e Irish
wastes from being reclaimed? In the Famine, our roads were torn up and
made impassable to apply a labour test to destitution; food was next
served out without any such test; M Soyer was sent over to make cheap
soup for the million; the bone and sinew of the country were shipped off
to spend themselves in trying to subdue the wildernesses of another
hemisphere, or die _in transitu_, or on Grosse Isle and such
charnel-houses, whilst nearly five millions of reclaimable acres in
their own fertile load were still left as nature had left them.

The second report of the Relief Commissioners bears date the 15th of
May. For practical purposes it may be looked upon as the first report,
the one called the first being merely preliminary. We learn from it that
only 1,248 electoral divisions had come under the operation of the Act
up to that date, a state of things with which the Commissioners
expressed themselves dissatisfied, for they say the Act should have
been, at the time of their report, in full operation over the whole
country. They found a difficulty in establishing soup kitchens, because
dry meal was universally preferred; and they further say that relief by
food instead of by public works was extremely unpopular with every
class. All works, they announce, had been stopped on the first of May.
To this general stoppage, some exceptions, it would seem, were
permitted. Memorandum No. 12 of the Relief Department (marked
"confidential") vests certain relief officers with a discretionary power
to continue the works in those baronies where it would be dangerous to
stop them, either because the new measures of relief had not come into
operation, or on account of the absence of employment, either public or
private, in such baronies. From the general outcry at the stoppage of
the works, it would appear that this memorandum was very little, if at
all, acted upon.

The second report of the Relief Commissioners, embracing a most trying
period of over two months, is very curt and unsatisfactory. The
dismissal, within six weeks, of nearly three quarters of a million of
workmen, representing more than three millions of people, could scarcely
be effected without the infliction of considerable suffering. The
Government were right in compelling labour to apply itself to the
production of food by the cultivation of the land, and they began this
movement in the Spring, the proper time for it, but they began too late.
The 20th of March