Ireland is like a strong man with an enormous cancer in one limb of his body. The distress is confined to particular districts, but there it is frightful and apparently irremediable. It is like a region desolated by pestilence and war. The people really are dying of hunger, and the means of aiding them do not exist. Here is a country, part and parcel of England, a few hours removed from the richest and most civilised community in the world, in a state so savage, barbarous, and destitute, that we must go back to the Middle Ages or to the most inhospitable regions of the globe to look for a parallel. Nobody knows what to do; everybody hints at some scheme or plan to which his next neighbour objects. Most people are inclined to consider the case as hopeless, to rest on that conviction, and let the evil work itself out, like a consuming fire, which dies away when there is nothing left for it to destroy. All call on the Government for a plan and a remedy, but the Government have no plan and no remedy; there is nothing but disagreement among them; and while they are discussing and disputing, the masses are dying. God only knows what is to be the end of all this, and how and when Ireland is to recover from such a deplorable calamity. Lord Lansdowne, a great Irish proprietor, is filled with horror and dread at the scheme that some propound, of making the sound part of Ireland rateable for the necessities of the unsound, which he thinks is neither more nor less than a scheme of confiscation, by which the weak will not be saved, but the strong be involved in the general ruin. Charles Wood has all along set his face against giving or lending money, or any Government interference in the capacity of capitalist, and he contemplates (with what seems like very cruelty, though he is not really cruel) that misery and distress should run their course; that such havoc should be made amongst the landed proprietors, that the price of land will at last fall so low as to tempt capitalists to invest their funds therein, and then that the country will begin to revive, and a new condition of prosperity spring from the ruin of the present possessors. This may, supposing it to answer, prove the ultimate regeneration of Ireland; but it will be at a cost of suffering to the actual possessors and to the whole of the present generation such as never was contemplated by any system of policy. Lord Lansdowne thinks Trevelyan[85] is the real author of this scheme, who, he tells me, has acquired a great influence over Charles Wood's mind. [Footnote 85: [Mr. Trevelyan, afterwards Sir Charles Trevelyan, Bart. and K.C.B., was at this time Secretary of the Treasury.]]