have seen; and I find one of the gentlemen who spoke using this language, "that five thousand had already perished by want and by disease; fever had made its appearance in many parts, and was daily cutting off the people by hundreds. The sole cause was want of food." Mr O'Connell at the same meeting, or on some other recent similar occasion, is reported to have said, that three hundred were dying daily; and as far as I have been able to form an opinion, by running my eye over the provincial accounts transferred to the London papers, I should think that one death daily from every neighborhood in the south and west of Ireland, was not an extravagant estimate. If this be so, Mr O'Connell's statement is quite within the bounds of the dreadful reality.

Then, Mr Chairman, as you have well remarked, these accounts come down to the end of the year, at farthest to the middle of January. Six or seven long months are yet to pass, before any harvest of grain can ripen and be reaped. What is to carry the people of Ireland through these dismal months, in which famine, despair, and death will be doing their work on a population already driven to the verge of madness? It cannot but be that the demoralization already commenced will go on. In the nature of things, due care to make ready the land for the coming season will be neglected. Seed corn and seed potatoes, as you have observed, where they exist, will be consumed for food. Outrages on property, under the spur of this sharp necessity, will take place. Those who have a little will hoard; those who have nothing will plunder. In the midst of frightful want there will be still more frightful waste; till, in the action and reaction of these physical and moral causes, there is great reason to fear that the framework of society, none too well compacted in this unhappy country, will wholly break down, and that horrors will be acted out in Ireland, in the course of the ensuing spring and summer, for which language has no adequate terms of description. God grant it may be otherwise; and nothing can do so much to prevent these forebodings from being realized, as to show to the people of Ireland, in the most effectual manner, that the eyes of a sympathizing

world are upon them. But I do fear, sir, if not checked by some such genial influence, that her fertile plains and lovely valleys will be the theatre before long of woes and horrors which it sickens one but to think of.

And now, Mr Chairman, we have come to consult together what we can do to contribute towards the mitigation of this great calamity; or rather to encourage each other to do the utmost in his power. What little I thought to say on this topic, has been anticipated by the gentlemen (Mr Stevenson and Dr Howe) who have already addressed you with such feeling and pertinence. It is true that no individual, no community even, can do much to relieve the sum total of this mighty calamity; but every community, every individual, can do something, and the aggregate of these somethings is to form, sir, for months, the only stay of famishing millions. Don't tell me we can do but little, when the little that we and others can do is the all of a starving country. And this I will say, sir, that there is no community on earth that can do more than this; I mean that there is not another, of its size, embracing a wider extent of prosperity. The glorious sun in the heavens, that looks down on the misery of famishing Ireland, does not, in his wide circuit, shine upon a spot more abounding, in proportion to its size, with the physical comforts of life, and therefore better able to minister of its surplus to the relief of that misery. I shall therefore be surprised I shall be deeply grieved—if on the list of contributions for the mitigation of this truly appalling calamity, the name of any place shall, in proportion to its numbers, stand higher than that of Boston. Indeed, I have no fears that it will be so. If unhappily I am disappointed, I shall at least hope, Mr Chairman, that not much will be hereafter said of what we have been willing to regard as the proverbial liberality of Boston.

Liberality, sir! I am almost ashamed to use the word at all on this occasion. The liberality of giving from your abundance, to save the lives of men, women, and children, who, to all intents, as was so well said by the eloquent gentleman (Dr Howe) who preceded me, are starving upon your

door-step! If we call this liberality, I should like to know what we should consider a duty. I rejoice to believe that I speak in the hearing of those who regard the work in which we now engage as one of duty, and that of the most imperative kinda duty so high and sacred, that, could we neglect it, I should almost expect that the walls of our massy warehouses, filled almost to bursting with every article of food which enters largely into commerce, would fall and crush us as we passed.

You carried our minds, Mr Mayor, by an interesting allusion, to the distant East. There is a dark tale in the traditions of a less distant foreign land, which has haunted my recollection, in reference to some of the sad details of the suffering which prevails in Ireland, as I have seen them in the English papers. It is hardly appropriate to the business character of this meeting, but I have not been able to get away from it. An Italian nobleman, in the middle ages, fell into the power of his enemy, he and several children, who threw them into a prison, and after long confinement, determined to starve them to death. The door of the dungeon was locked, and the key thrown into the Arno. This much, I believe, is matter of history. The secrets of that prison house are known only as they were revealed to the imagination of Dante. After the first day passed without food, the father too well foreboding the doom that awaited them, a dear child, his little Anselm, plaintively asks the cause of his gloomy silence. Another and another day passes, and still no food. The parent, not so much from hunger as in frenzy, gnaws his own hands. His children, duteous even in that dire extremity, supposing that the pangs of starvation were more keenly felt by their father than by themselves, implore him, instead of devouring his own limbs, to feed on them, and thus take back the wretched flesh with which he had clothed them. On the fourth day, Gaddo crawls to his wretched parent's feet, and feebly crying, "My father, why do you not help me?" dies.

This piteous tale, embalmed with the tears of five centuries, is no longer a remote poetic vision. It is, in all the substantial features, a horrid reality, passing within a fortnight's sail

of us. There is not a foot of terra firma, sir, between the city over which you preside and the scene of these woes. They are taking place, not in a solitary instance, but in hundreds; not within the walls of a dungeon, amidst the fury of civil wars, in a benighted age, but within open doors, by the way side, beneath the blue sky, in the face of heaven and of men, — in the nineteenth century; in this all-daring, all-achieving, all-boasting nineteenth century; and astonished Europe and astonished America stand looking on, paralyzed, as it were, by the extent of the calamity; - but paralyzed, I trust, sir, but for a moment. A spirit of Christian charity has been awakened on both sides of the water, worthy of the occasion; and well I know that Faneuil Hall is not the spot where it will burn with the least fervor. Let me only beseech you, what you do, to do quickly. It is a fearful thought that, do what you will, not a barrel of flour, purchased with the funds provided this evening, can be laid down within the Cove of Cork under six weeks, at the very soonest, taking the average chances of sailing vessels at this season. Before it gets there, the man, the family, which it might have saved, will have perished. Yes, sir, while I fill your ears with these empty words, some of our poor fellow-Christians in Ireland have starved to death.

AID TO THE COLLEGES.

AT the commencement of the legislative session for the year 1848, a petition was presented to the two houses, praying for aid to the colleges. The particular mode of granting aid to the colleges suggested by the memorialists was, to provide for the accumulation of the school fund beyond its present legal limit, ($1,000,000,) till it should reach $1,500,000, and to divide the additional half million in some suitable proportion between the three colleges. The petition was signed by the presidents of the three colleges, on behalf of their respective boards of trustees; and it was supported by memorials in favor of the object from a large number of persons of respectability and influence in different parts of the commonwealth. This petition and these memorials were referred to the joint committee of education, who granted a private hearing to the friends of the colleges on the first of February. This meeting was attended by the president (Mr Everett) and the treasurer (Mr Eliot) of Harvard College, by Rev. Dr Hitchcock, president of Amherst College, Hon. W. B. Calhoun, secretary of state and a trustee of Amherst College, John Tappan, Esq., also a trustee of Amherst, Edmund Dwight, Esq., of Boston, and by a few other gentlemen, friends of education and of the colleges.

A letter was read by the Hon. Orin Fowler, chairman of the joint standing committee, from Rev. Dr Hopkins, president of Williams College, expressive of his regret that he was unable to attend.

The chairman of the committee, having read the memorial of the institutions, invited the gentlemen present, and repre