d in Dublin, but not one of them was
constituted after the plan suggested by O'Connell, although many
influential persons expressed their warm approval of it, one landlord,
whilst he did so, offensively applying to its originator the vile
quotation:--_fas est ab hoste doceri_.

Towards the end of September Mr. Monsell, of Tervoe,[136] addressed a
letter to the Irish Chief Secretary, in which he reminds him that the
Labour-rate Act was framed and passed into law at a time when the
Government did not foresee that the potato rot would be making fearful
ravages in every electoral division in Ireland by the first of
September;--that in a number of those there would not be a potato fit to
eat on the first of October, and that, in all probability there would
not remain in the country any considerable quantity of potatoes suitable
for human food by November. In view of this terrific state of things, he
thinks it is no exaggeration to say, that for ten months to come labour
must be found for five hundred thousand men, the cost of which could not
be under five millions of pounds; and as destitution in the South and
West was greater than in the other parts of the country, a great portion
of this sum should be raised in Munster and Connaught. The people were
starving, and be the law good or bad they must be employed under it, as
it was the only way the poor could, for the time, be relieved. He
reviews the provisions of the Labour-rate Act, and like so many other
enlightened men of the period--whose opinions he may be fairly taken to
represent, he is alarmed at the principle of unproductive labour upon
which it was based. The money necessary for the support of the people
must, for the most part, be raised from the land, and as this vast sum,
so raised, does not "revolve back again upon the land," it would be
impossible, he thought, for the nation to recover from such a shock. It
was universally acknowledged that the want of sufficient capital was one
of the great evils--if not _the_ great evil of Ireland. There was
abundant scope for the profitable expenditure of capital, "in every
corner of Ireland--in every barony--almost in every townland; the money
expended upon its improvement would return a large interest of at least
ten per cent., [the usual estimate made by practised men was higher, but
he, being anxious to avoid exaggeration, leaves it at ten], and the
capital of the country would, of course, be largely increased by such
ex