Tue sympathy of the residents in Shanghai is very properly evoked for Irelnnd. Hongicong has contributed liberally Lo assist the unfortunate island in her present trouble, and though the claims on the purses of (he residents here are many and pressing there can be little doubt that a sum of money respectable in amount will be gathered. The miseries of Ireland are a hackneyed theme and it is easy to turn away from the demands of the inhabitants with cynic contempt. Still we must recollect that many of the calamities of "the land of the green hill and the rushing river" are directly excused by the bad conduct of England in past centuries. We are reaping where we have sown, and it is but just for us to do something to atone for past neglect. At present our concern is with certain facts in regard to Ireland which will bring out a point we have lately laboured to enfur viz., that China is in a state of civilization or uncivil lization which may be fairly matched with that which prevailed in certain European countries two or three centuries ago. We conceive that one of the best proofs of a country being civilized, or to speak more precisely, one of the most trustworthy measures of the civilization of a realm is the extent of the efforts made in it by science and benevolence to combat visitations like pestilence, war and famine. The high civilization of modern Europe has certainly minimized the suffering which these three scourges have brought upon it. Nothing displayed the resourceless and inefficient condition of China so forcibly as the helplessness of the people in the late famine. We all remember the pictures which wore circulated at that time of wretches Killing themselves to avoid the linger. ing pangs of hunger; of men and women eating their kinsfolks' flesh, and of hunger-bitten abjects feeding on dead bodies. With these representations and the descriptions of the missionaries full in our recollection, we cannot fail to be struck with a description of a famine in Ireland in 1641, We quote a paper "On some forgotten aspects of the Irish Question" in a recent number of the Contemporary Review, "Figures," we read, "convey but a poor notion of the state to which the country was reduced, Famine, as at the and of the Blizabethau wars, stepped in to complete the havoc of the sword. A plague followed. Suicide became epidemic, as the only escape from the intolerable evils of life, Cannibalism reappeared, According to an eye-witness, whole counties were cleared of their inhabitants. When survivors were fouud, they were either old men and women or children, I have seen these miserable creatures," says Colonel Lawrence, " plucking stinking carrion out of a ditch black and rotten, and been credibly informed that they digged corpses out of the grave treat." Now as it was in Ireland in the seventeenth century so it is in Chine in the nineteenth. If we wish to see how much science and philauthopy do towards the reduction of suffering compare the details just quoted with the accounts of the misery which we are called upon to assist in relieving in Ireland to-day. Ireland is in a backward state and is stigmatized as an unprogressive country, but it has advanced amazingly in the last two centuries. Still it is useful to reflect that couple of hundred years ago, a portion of whut is now Great Britain was in a condition of wretchedness and barbarism akin to that which prevails at this moment in China. Still, though the sufferings of the Irish at the present moment are not to be compared with the sufferings of their ancestors, there is misery enough to touch the heart and to loosen the purse-strings of persons possessing human feelings all over the world. We read of one thousand destitute families in Donegal of Manor Hamilton where crowds of people are clamouring for food and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.