d on the Caharagh line. "But these stories,"
he added, "received in gossip, are turned against the Board of Works."
It is not very clear what this official meant by stories, but there is
one thing plain enough in the matter: Mr. Notter's men must have been in
arrear of their pay as well as those on the Caharagh works, or there
could be no opportunity of expending the Caharagh money upon them. If
Mr. Notter had got his own money together with the Caharagh money, he
certainly would not require both remittances. There is another thing
pretty obvious too: if the money had been directed to the overseer of
the Caharagh works, Mr. Notter would not be justified in paying it away
to his workmen. In reference to the flippant pertness of the Board's
officials, the Rev. Mr. Townsend, the incumbent of Abbeystowry, said:
"We have here M'Kennedy's death and the cause of it sworn to. That
evidence proves that our people are dying by the ditch-side for want of
payment of their hire. We take no such statements, sir, on gossip, nor
shall we be told we do." The jury returned the following verdict: "We
find that the said Denis M'Kennedy, on the 24th day of October, in the
year aforesaid, at Caharagh, in the county aforesaid, died of
starvation, owing to the gross negligence, of the Board of Works."

The _Times_, commenting on Lord John Russell's letter to the Duke of
Leinster, said: "We in England consider it the first duty of the
landlord to provide extraordinary employment to meet extraordinary
distress; we do not wait until an Act of Parliament converts a duty into
a necessity. In Ireland, even with special facilities, it has been very
sparingly and tardily done."[182] This remark about Irish landlords has
much truth in it. They took every means of shifting responsibility upon
the Government; they lost no opportunity of publicly declaring and of
endeavouring to prove that the duty of employing the people rested with
the Government and not with them: then, when the vast system of Relief
Works which sprang up under the hands of the Government in two or three
short months did not prove perfectly satisfactory, it became quite the
fashion with the landlord class to denounce the Board of Works, and
through it the Government. To be sure there was much reason for this,
but the landlords, of all others, had no right to cast the stone; for,
in the interests of truth and justice it must be said, that the
Government made some efforts to save the peop