STATE OF TIPPERARY.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume III, Issue 197, 19 June 1847, Page 4

STATE OF TIPPERARY.

Mr. Serjeant Hawley (admitted by all parties to be a most impartial authority), in opening the Quarter Sessions at Nenagh on Friday, drew the following sketch of the state of the people in that district : — " Writers of fiction have drawn the terrors, the desolation, the sufferings attendant on the plague of former times : but those pictures of the imagination, highly coloured as they may be, do not equal those simple recitals of real suffering and misery which the chronicles of the time daily present before us. Robust men, worn and gaunt with famine — weak women and helpless children sinking down from want of food — famished human beings uttering the cry of hunger until that cry is stopped by death — even the decent forms of burial obliged to be dispensed with, and the uushrouded victims consigned uncoffined to the grave. This state of things, which is more applicable to other localities than it is at present with us, will extend throughout the land if some speedy remedy be not applied. Whatever is to- be done must be immediate and large.

The conditions of life will not admit of delay. Physical wants cannot be satisfied by mere moral speculations. It would ill become me in this place, and indeed I am not much disposed to do so in any place, to criticise the conduct of those charged with the safety of the people. A great and almost unprecedented difficulty has fallen upon them ; the measures to meet it must be ample and generous ; and the imperial bounty was never better applied, or to more reproductive work, than in saving the people of this country. Amongst ourselves this great affliction has not been without its compensation. It will teach the wealthier classes, that in our nicely balanced social system their interests, their prosperity, are intimately connected with the well-being of those beneath them, while the poorer orders will understand that from the higher ranks they may look for and receive those /supplies in their need which they have been latterly receiving in generous abundance. It would, indeed, be both ungenerous and unjust to call for assistance from others without having performed our own part of the duty. There is one subject more to which 1 wish to call your attention. As I travelled through the country I was sorry to see so little preparation making for the supply of next year. A large portion of the land is not alone uncultivated, but no steps are taken to prepare it. Next to a present supply of food, this evil demands to be looked to. Reasoning beings, whose condition of existence is to provide their food by the labour of their hands, must be either criminally negligent or insane who will thus abandon their duty. Something must be done, and_quickly done, in this respect. The spring sowing is at hand, and if the land be not sown with such, white or green crops as may be suitable, we shall have a succession of scarcity. It should be remembered that even with the fullest efforts in this respect there will be still a great deficiency in the food of the people. Green crops or root crops, to the full extent of the potato land, will still leave nearly two-thirds to be supplied from some other source, to give the people food. I know that in many cases the occupiers of small farms have at present neither time nor money to cultivate their land. Many, very many, of this class are the recipients of public bounty on the public works. If they cannot do it themselves, they must be assisted in doing so, and a small outlay at present for this purpose will save the necessity of a much larger expenditure hereafter, to repair the consequences of neglect."