re severely wounded. The police discharged forty rounds before the
people dispersed. Griffin stated that neither himself, nor many of the
people assembled, had eaten any food for two or three days.

In several other places the soup-kitchens were attacked, and the boilers
broken or attempted to be broken. At Kilfenora, the people carried off
the boiler and threw it into a lough. So that in the matter of the new
relief system, the Government were not only very slow in getting it into
operation, but when they did so, it was distasteful to the people in
various places. How slow they were appears from an answer given to a
question asked by Lord Fitzwilliam in the House of Lords, so late as the
11th of May. On that day he asked the Government to what extent the new
Act--commonly known as the Soup-kitchen Act--had been brought into
operation. Lord Lansdowne, in reply, said that "there had been
preparations in various places under the auspices of the relief
committees, and with the aid of voluntary contributions they were
putting the Act into operation; but _the Act had been so recently
passed_, the Government had no exact information upon the subject;
inquiries, however, should be instituted." The Act had become law on the
26th of February, nearly three months before; besides which, the
Government were, or said they were, organizing beforehand the machinery
by which it was to be carried out, and it was specially intended to take
the place of the relief works, all of which had ceased on the 1st of
May, so that Lord Lansdowne's reply was a very cool one under the
circumstances.

Although the spring work must have absorbed a very considerable portion
of the dismissed labourers, it did not absorb them all, nor anything
near it; whilst those who failed to get employment, or were unfit for
it, had not the new relief to turn to. The poorhouses became dangerously
crowded. The poorlaw statistics of 1847 show this in a striking manner:
in the beginning of the year--that is in mid-winter, a time when there
is scarcely any employment--the total number receiving relief in the
Irish workhouses was 52,626. One month after the dismissals of the 20th
of March--namely, on the 17th of April, perhaps the very busiest period
in the farmer's year--the number in the workhouses had doubled; the
figure standing on that day at 104,200; being about 11,000 more than
they were built to accommodate; nor did this suffer any notable
diminution until the har