Note 195 — Chapter X

Mr. D'Israeli, in his Political Biography of Lord George Bentinck, quotes this passage, and, as it seems to me, manipulates it unfairly, by ending it at the word "decimated," as if there were a full stop there, whereas the sense in the original only requires a comma, and so it is in Hansard. To make the sense terminate at "decimated," he moulds a sentence and a half into one, thus: "The Chief Secretary says, that the ministers did wisely in this decision, but I differ from him when I hear, every day, of persons being starved to death, and when he, himself, admits that in many parts of the country the population had been decimated;" the censure on the Government contained in the words immediately succeeding, is omitted. The reason why Mr. D'Israeli did this is obvious from what follows, which shows he did not agree with Lord George, in censuring the Government for not opening depôts, and he undertakes to prove that they should not have done so. He uses, amongst others, the old trite argument, when he says: there is reason to believe that the establishment of Government depôts at the end of '46, however cautiously introduced, tended in the localities to arrest the development of that retail trade, which was then rapidly extending throughout Ireland."—Lord George Bentinck, a political Biography, 5th Ed., pp. 360, 363.