abour-rate
Act had come into operation there came, he said, on the part of the
proprietors and country gentlemen of Ireland, a complaint that the works
were useless, that they were not wanted, and that they were not
reproductive. The First Minister, strange to say, did not attach any
great value to these objections. "I think," he said, "the object being
relief, and to combine relief with a certain amount of work, to show
that habits of industry have not been entirely abandoned, that the
productive nature of the work was a question of secondary importance. We
spend in Ireland upwards of L1,000,000 a-year in poor-rates, and I do
not believe that if enquiry were made it would be found that any
productive works were the result." So much the worse; and it was one of
the great objections to the Irish Poor-law system, that under it no
provision was made for the profitable employment of able-bodied paupers.
To call the productiveness or non-productiveness of the labour of half a
million of men a matter of secondary importance was, certainly, most
cool assurance on the part of a professed political economist, who must
hold as a central dogma of that science that labour is the principal
producer of capital. Everybody admitted that the crying want of Ireland
was the want of capital; yet here is a Minister, holding in his hands
her destinies during a life-and-death struggle for existence, and an
ardent disciple of Adam Smith besides, expressing his belief that to
expend in useless and even pernicious works the labour of half a million
of men was a matter of secondary importance; and because it was, he did
not attach any great weight to the objection! It was not, therefore, he
said, such an objection that caused the Government to sanction a
modification of the law as was announced in the letter of the Irish
Chief Secretary, but because it was desirable to obtain the co-operation
of the landed gentry of Ireland, and, if possible, to have the labour
made reproductive, that the plan of reproductive works was sanctioned.
But this plan did not win the Irish landowners, and they began a new
agitation for townland divisions. On this point he quoted the following
passage from a letter of Smith O'Brien, in which the Prime Minister said
he fully concurred: "This plan had the merit of being intelligible,
simple, and effective. It is undoubtedly better that the population
should be so employed than in destroying good land, by making new lines
of