Archbishop Vaughan on the Irish Distress.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3493, 5 March 1880, Page 2

Archbishop Vaughan on the Irish Distress.

I Al the Irish Famine Belief meeting, held in the Masonic Hall, Sydney, an eloquent speech was delivered by Archbishop Vaughan, who, after referring to the, dreadful scenes of the famine in 1847, proceeded:—" Thank God, we do not know what famine is here, but we doknow what flood is. Add your own floods to an Irish famioe—add starvation from hunger to starvation from cold, wet, and you have i picture of the present distress. Add whatlyou know yourselves to what I hare described, and you will then be able in part, at least, to-grasp the necessity, the crying wants of the present case. I can see now, in imagination, a peasant family iv Ireland. The old man and his wife, and his son and bis wife, and the little children. The early promise of a crop has ended in blight and rottenness; the little field of corn is underwater: the cot in which they lived is soaked with winter's rain, and shrieks with the winter wind. There is no smoke from the big chimney—-for there is no fire—the turf is soakedi and is melting into a black slime. They are all shivering in damp rags, huddled together—you can scarcely say that they have any clothes. Lbok at the old man. He wears thc-Victoria Cross. He battled in the trenches in the Crimea, and his brothers, and those before him, they were always to the front where the British tag was— always ready for the forlorn hope, to spill their lives for the glory of the empire. Look at the aged woman. She cannot last long. All her children are not with her. One fell in South Africa, and she wept as bitter tears as any Empress wept over the corpse of her only son. Another is in Australia free-selecting, active, energetic, and well-to-do. The rest are round her knee begging for food, which she cannot give to them. I seem to see three hands stretched out towards Australia—a child's, a woman's, and a man's. The child's is not so plump as other children s, bnt more like a bird's claw ; the woman's is so thin that her marriage ringis quite loose upon her finger ; the man's hands are stretched out and clasped. And I hear the younger woman cry out " O you, who live amidst flocks and herds, amidst cornfields and vineyards, in a land in whose bosom the gold dwells—ye English, for whom our family have fought in many a bloody field—send us some succour quickly. Ye Scotch, who belong to the same wide empire, do not forget us; and you Irish, O you my countrymen! Miseremini met, miseremini met, saltern vos arnica met, puia manus Domini tetigit me—? have mercy on me, have mercy on me, at least you my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath touched me." At the meeting, says the Sydney Morning Herald, a sum of £2,500 was collected.