"As secretaries of the Kilglass Relief Committee, we have been requested to make application through you to the Mansion House Committee, to aid us in our preset endeavour to meet the awful distress now in our midst. We confess we have been to slow, if not too late, in this, our appeal, for already numbers have been starving after having eaten not only their seed potatoes, but devoured the diseased and half-rotten roots, which were quite unfit for human use, and which, in the present instance, we fear have brought on pestilence and disease, as the natural result of such unnatural food In one town land alone there are at present ten families suffering from fever, which in the opinion of the medical officer of the district, is induced by cold, want of clothing and scarcity of proper nourishment. We, in common with every well wisher of Ireland would prefer anything to gratuitous relief, and therefore we have earnestly appealed to the landlords of this parish to assist their tenants by means of remunerative employment in improving their own estates. We have had some favourable promises to the above effect from all; yet, with one or two honourable exceptions, these promises have never been realised; they have picked up what rents they could, and then, oblivious of their own promises, have lent a deaf ear to the pitiful entreaties of their starving tenantry.

"Many of these poor tenants who, relying on the faith of these specious promises have paid their rents, are now the most needy applicants for the charity of strangers We have at present some 330 families, numbering close upon 1,700 individual relief lists, and judging from their emaciated and evidently hunger-stricken appearance and the reports of trustworthy persons who have made house-to-house visits of their respective localities, all have been suffering the most inconceivable and dire distress Therefore, may we most earnestly beg you will use your powerful influence in our favour, and assist us in our laborious, we might almost say, hopeless task of combatting and surmounting the difficulties of our very trying position.