ended to be reproductive; the public works which it sanctioned being,
as Secretary Labouchere said, in his letter, only undertaken with a view
of relieving the temporary distress occasioned by the failure of the
potato crop. On this account, the dissatisfaction with the measure was
very general from every section of politicians; not that it was thought,
except perhaps by some few, that the Government were unwilling to
provide against the great Famine which all felt was already holding the
Irish nation in its deadly grasp, but because it was felt and believed,
that the mode chosen for that purpose was the very worst possible. Under
the Labour-rate Act, not so much as one rood of ground could be
reclaimed or improved. The whole bone and sinew of the nation, its best
and truest capital, must be devoted to the cutting down of hills and the
filling up of hollows, often on most unfrequented by-ways, where such
work could not be possibly required; and in making roads, which, as the
Prime Minister himself afterwards acknowledged, "were not wanted," but
which Colonel Douglas, a Government Inspector, more accurately described
"as works which would answer no other purpose than that of obstructing
the public conveyances." This radical defect of the Act was well and
happily put by Lord Devon, when he said it authorized "unproductive work
to be executed by borrowed money."

The Act was criticised for other reasons too. It made no provision for
the completion of the works taken in hand to relieve the people in 1846;
and those works must be finished by the 15th of August of that year, or
not at all, a full fortnight before the Labour-rate Act had become the
law of the land. Of course many of them were unfinished at that date.
Clearly, this was wrong; for on the supposition that they were works of
at least some utility, and not mere child's-play to afford an excuse to
the Government for giving the people the price of food, they should have
been completed. They consisted chiefly in the making or altering or
improving of roads--and everybody knows that unfinished road-work is
worse than useless,--it is a positive injury. Parts of innumerable roads
in Ireland were impassable for years after those works had closed; and
many a poor man, whose horse and dray got locked in the adhesive mud of
a cut-down but unshingled hill, vented his anger against the Board of
Works in the most indignant terms.

The sudden closing of the works of 1846, some e