rnment--The people should have been supplied with food in remote
districts--He did not agree with the political economy of
non-interference--Mr. D'Israeli's manipulation of Lord George's
speech--Letter of Rev. Mr. Townsend of Skibbereen--Fourteen funerals
waiting whilst a fifteenth corpse was being interred--Quantity of
corn in London, Liverpool and Glasgow--Lord John Russell's
speech--He regarded the Famine as a "national calamity"--Absurd
reason for not having summoned Parliament in Autumn--Sir Robert
Peel's view--The Prime Minister on the state of Ireland--His
views--His plans--Defends the action of the Government--Defends
unproductive work--Reason for issuing the "Labouchere
letter"--Quotes Smith O'Brien approvingly--Mr. O'Brien's letters to
the landlords of Ireland (_note_)--Confounding the questions of
temporary relief and permanent improvement--Fallacy--Demoralization
of labour--The Premier's "group of measures"--Soup
kitchens--Taskwork--Breakdown of the Public Works--Food for
nothing--Mode of payment of loans--L50,000 for seed--Impossibility
of meeting the Famine completely--The permanent measures for
Ireland--Drainage Act--Reclamation of waste lands--Sir Robert Kane's
"Industrial Resources" of Ireland--Emigration again--Ireland not
overpeopled--Description of England and Scotland in former times by
Lord John Russell--His fine exposition of "the Irish question"--Mr.
P. Scrope's Resolution--A count out--Bernal Osborne--Smith
O'Brien--The good absentee landlords--The bad resident
landlords--Sir C. Napier's view--Mr. Labouchere's kind
words--Confounds two important questions--Mr. Gregory's quarter-acre
clause--Met with some opposition--Irish liberals vote for it--The
opponents of the quarter-acre clause--Lord George Bentinck's attack
on the Government (_note_).

About the middle of December, there was formed in Dublin a committee of
landlords, which assumed the name of the Reproductive Works Committee.
Its objects were excellent. It was to be the beginning of a real Irish
party, whose members were to lay aside their differences, political and
religious, that, by a united effort, they might carry the country
through the death-struggle in which it then was, and lay the foundation
of its future progress to prosperity. Many of the best men in the whole
nation were active promoters of this movement; but, vie