course--if you throw away the opportunity placed by Providence in your
hands--if you allow the vast sums of money which you have to direct the
distribution of to be spent unprofitably, we shall retrograde as fast as
under the other alternative we should have advanced; and those who have
been year after year hoping against hope, and labouring against the
tide, will fold their arms in despair."

A deputation from Cork waited on the Prime Minister to urge upon his
attention the utility and necessity of employing the people in
productive instead of non-productive works. He read to them a reply, in
which he said he thought the measures that had passed through Parliament
ought to be sufficient to meet the existing emergency; but whilst he
expressed this view he, using the time-honored official style of
replying to deputations, promised that the subject should receive the
deepest consideration during the ensuing session of Parliament. There
were, he said, subjects of great difficulty to be encountered in
legislating for a country circumstanced as Ireland was. The lands held
by Government might be at once improved, but the case was different with
respect to those that were the property of individuals. Still, he would
not shrink from the necessity or duty of Government interfering even in
the latter case; neither did he deny that while property had its owners
and its rights, that such ownership and rights should not be allowed to
interfere with the operations intended to develop the resources of the
soil, and improve the social condition of the people. The Premier here
uses the far-famed sentiment, almost the very words, of Secretary
Drummond, that property has its duties as well as its rights; but a
sentiment, however just, is but an empty form of words, unless it
receives a practical application at the proper time. The threadbare and
almost insulting platitudes--insulting from the very frequency of their
use--about developing resources and improving the social condition of
the people, were strangely out of place at a moment when coroner's
juries, in various parts of Ireland, were beginning to return verdicts
of "Death from starvation." Lord John, now that he was Minister, talked
of difficulties in legislating for Ireland, especially with regard to
the reclamation of land; when he was only an expectant of office, his
expressed sentiments were quite different. In his speech on the Coercion
Bill, two or three months before, he s