even in Dublin, on the 22nd of March, just one week before.
How, in that one week they were got ready, and sent by tons and hundreds
weight to all parts of the country; how the new committees were
organized; how the boilers were set up, the fires lighted, and the soup
made and distributed to three quarters of a million of people; how those
people discussed its flavour and qualities, and how they had had time to
give expression to their views, and how those views reached the Irish
Secretary in London before the 29th of March, are things which could be
only explained by the Irish Secretary himself. This fact, however, was
known to the general public, that on the 23rd of March there was not a
quart of the new relief-system soup yet made in Ireland; and that on the
29th, at the moment the Secretary was answering Smith O'Brien, it is
more than probable that the fact was still the same.

The promise which Mr. O'Brien said the Government was understood to have
made, and which Mr. Labouchere treats so cavalierly in his reply, was
contained in the following words, spoken by the First Minister on
bringing forward the new Relief Bill:--"We must take care--and the Lord
Lieutenant is prepared to take care--that the substitution of this
system for public works shall be made as easy in the transition as
possible. There will be no rude dismissal of the people at once, who
otherwise might find great difficulty in obtaining subsistence; but when
the arrangements are made for carrying the scheme I have described into
effect, it will be provided that no further presentments shall be made,
and no new public works undertaken."[262] These are strong words, and
were certainly meant to convey that there was to be no interregnum in
which the people would be left to starve between the cessation of the
public works and the establishment of the new system of relief.

But the most curious part of Mr. Labouchere's explanation is the extract
from Colonel Jones's letter. In the Colonel's opinion it was a great
mistake of the Dublin press to assume that the men discharged from the
works had been deprived, in an instant, of their daily food. No such,
thing: it was gross ignorance or wilful calumny to assert it. The
dismissed labourers, Colonel Jones tells us, had no right to claim their
wages till Tuesday or Wednesday, yet he generously pays them on the
Saturday--two or three days before! But did he pay them for the Monday
and the Tuesday?--not a word ab