bour is the only resource of starving millions; but from the moment you have established a cheap and severe system of charity, you render possible a system of free and productive labour. Proprietors and farmers will then be able to make their own resources available; and should those resources be insufficient, it will be the interest of the State to lend to them on their individual responsibility, because the money thus lent will be usefully laid out and honestly repaid. Public works really useful ought, also, to be undertaken in those districts, if possible; but the usefulness of the work should be its obvious sanction, and the relief afforded should be only an incident. None but the able-bodied should be employed; and those who worked ill should be at once discharged, an easy matter where the alternative is not starvation. In public as in private works, it might be useful to require, in the case of young men without families, that a portion of the wages earned should be reserved as a fund to assist emigration at the conclusion of the work. In the third place, where the pressure from without is great, and you find labour, however unproductive, necessary, as the only test of destitution, call it by the name of a test, and give to those who demand it simply the necessaries of life in proportion to the size of their family. The old man will thus continue to sit in his chimney corner, instead of breaking stones in the blasts of February, and dying before March: the man who has ten in family will get his ten rations: the farmer's servant boy

will discover that by deserting his master he can earn no more than twopence a day: the smallest possible number of applications for employment will be made the largest possible amount of private employment will be given: charity will be of the cheapest and least disturbing sort, and labour will be productive.

To return from this digression, the Labour Rate Act, as I have stated, failed. Irritated by this disappointment, and not willing to account for it on grounds common to human nature, which would have condemned your own legislation, you attributed it to the depravity of Irish nature. Parliament at last met, and it was found expedient to change the whole system of Irish relief. Several other laws were passed, as a compliance with the more innocent of our prejudices. I allude to the suspension of the Navigation Laws, and the measures permitting the free importation of corn, and the use of sugar in the distilleries. The effect of those enactments was such as to prove that if Parliament had been summoned to meet in autumn, as we had ventured to hope it might have been, for the purpose of both passing such measures, and amending the Labour Rate Act, the supply of food would have been greater than it was, the prices lower, and many thousands of lives might have been spared. The sum of £600,000 was subsequently voted as a loan to two or three Irish Railway Companies, and £500,000 under the

"Land Improvement Act" to Irish proprietors. As the latter loan has frequently been estimated at a million and a half, it is necessary to mention that the portion of it to which I have not referred, viz. £1,000,000, was voted on separate grounds, at the conclusion of the preceding session, together with £2,000,000 lent to English and Scotch proprietors. In consequence of some blunders in the wording of the Act (for blunders are not confined to this side of the water) the portion of this loan intended for Irish proprietors was not to be had when most wanted; and those who had applied for loans under the various drainage Acts had found the proceedings too slow to supply so urgent a need. One-half of the money spent upon the roads was then charged upon the imperial purse, instead of upon the lands cut up by them, and in many cases damaged rather than improved; the Minister of the Crown admitting that so vast a disaster as the potato failure was an imperial calamity, and consequently that the whole of the money spent in mitigation of it could not with justice be charged on those districts which, independent of any charge, had felt the visitation most severely. It was, at the same time, intimated to us that from the beginning the calamity had been regarded as an imperial one, and that there had been a latent intention to meet it in that manner which would have been deemed just had it fallen on Yorkshire or Cornwall; but that it was

thought no more than discreet to hide this project. from the Irish people, lest, puffed up with exaggerated expectations, they might abuse, to their own ruin, what was intended for their good. But, Sir, you must have perceived that in the ordinary business of life this sort of proceeding is unsuccessful: and, indeed, even on trivial occasions, what has been projected as a pleasant surprise often turns out to have been in bad taste or unseasonable. In Ireland the surprise was anticipated; the justice as well as necessity of the measure had been for some time a matter of notoriety; and your own intentions were prophetically announced to you at a time when your modesty would have concealed them from the world, and even from yourselves. In the meantime, as our assurances on this subject were confidently denied, we considered that the existing law was to this country a great injustice; which circumstance, as well as our grave disapprobation of unproductive labour, on a colossal scale and at the beginning of a famine, and of a very expensive test of destitution which acted as a premium to paupers instead of as a test of pauperism, must, I fear, have damped the ardour of several Relief Committees, infecting some members with a spirit of recklessness, and in others fostering that easy good-nature and dislike to martyrdom, of which you justly complain. I mention this circumstance to account in part for the fact, which ought not to be concealed, that while some Relief

Committees struggled to the utmost against the difficulties that beset them, there were also instances of weakness and neglect of duty. In justice also to the relief system, we are bound to remember that at the time when it was passed through Parliament the extent of the subsequent distress could not be fully known; and that, if that distress had been less, the bad results of a system vicious in principle, must have been proportionally diminished, and, indeed, more than proportionally.

The laws of last session, to which I have alluded, were all of them considered in this country well intended, and, in a measure, useful laws: but in England they did not fail to increase the popular indignation. Many prognostications were disproved by them and much English money, that is to say imperial money, was thrown away, that is to say, bestowed upon the Irish part of the children of the empire; your England not being able to tolerate the gift which another England bestowed, and which, munificent as it was, would probably have been made ampler still if the pecuniary need had been greater. Day after day new invectives against the Irish were poured out by the English press: a Thersites never wants subject-matter for his spleen : and in this instance the process of defamation was not a difficult one. It was easy to pick up a particular instance of oppression, or neglect of duty, such as are to be found in every country, and to