The 15th of August was fixed for the cessation of the Government works, as well as the Government relief, because it was considered that relief extended beyond that time would be, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer said, in reply to a question from O'Connell, "an evil of great magnitude." When the relief was withdrawn, and the blight had manifested itself in such giant proportions, the friends of the people saw nothing but famine with all its attendant horrors at their doors. At this time I find the Secretary of the Mallow Relief Committee, the Rev. C.B. Gibson, calling the urgent attention of the Commissioners of Relief, in Dublin Castle, to the state of his district, and his facts may be taken as a fair specimen of the state of a great portion of the country at the moment. He had just made a house-to-house visitation of the portion of the country over which the operations of his committee extended, and he says, the people were already starving, their only food being potatoes no larger than marbles, the blight having stopped their growth. He took some of the best of those potatoes to his house, and found that twelve of them weighed just four ounces and a-half--merely the weight of one very ordinary sized full-grown potato. They sickened the people instead of satisfying their hunger. In many places the children were kept in bed for want of clothing, as also to enable them to silence, to some extent, the pangs of hunger; some of them had not had any food for a day and a-half. And such beds as those starving children had! Of many he describes one. It consisted of a heap of stones built up like a blacksmith's fire-place, (these are his words), with a little hay spread over it; bed clothes there were none. One of the children of this family had died of starvation a fortnight before. The people in every house were pallid and sickly, and to all appearance dying slowly for want of sufficient nourishment. Mick Sullivan, a specimen of the labouring class, was the owner of a cabin in which Mr. Gibson found two starved and naked children; this man was obliged to pay a rent of £1 15s. a year for that cabin, and £2 5s. for half an English acre of potato garden, or rather for half an acre of mountain bog. He paid for these by his labour at 6d. a day. It took one hundred and sixty days' clear work to pay for them, and of course his potato garden was no use to him this year. Mr. Gibson valued the furniture in another cabin, John Griffin's, at 15d. A week before Mr. Gibson's visit, the parish priest had found in the same district, a mother dividing among three of her children that nourishment which nature only intended for their infancy. And this was the moment at which the Government relief was withdrawn, because the harvest had come in. It is not matter for wonder that the Rev. Secretary of the Mallow Belief Committee indignantly asks, "Is not the social condition of the Hottentot, who was once thought to be the most wretched of mankind,