Lord John having announced the intention of the Government, to bring in a bill empowering the Lord Lieutenant to summon baronial and county sessions, for the purpose of providing public works for the Irish people, proposed that the Commissioners of her Majesty’s Treasury should issue Exchequer bills for L175,000 as a grant, and for L255,000 as a loan, to pay for the works that might be undertaken.  He concluded in these words:  “Sir, as I stated at the commencement, this is an especial case, requiring the intervention of Parliament.  I consider that the circumstances I have stated, of that kind of food which constitutes the subsistence of millions of people in Ireland being subjected to the dreadful ravages of this disease, constitutes this a case of exception, and renders it imperative on the Government and the Parliament to take extraordinary measures of relief.  I trust that the course I propose to pursue will not be without its counterbalancing advantages:  that it will show the poorest among the Irish people that we are not insensible, here, to the claims which they have on us in the Parliament of the United Kingdom; that the whole credit of the Treasury and means of the country are ready to be used, as it is our bounden duty to use them, and will, whenever they can be usefully applied, be so disposed as to avert famine, and to maintain the people of Ireland; and that we are now disposed to take advantage of the unfortunate spread of this disease among the potatoes, to establish public works which may be of permanent utility.  I trust, sir, that the present state of things will have that counterbalancing advantage in the midst of many misfortunes and evil consequences."[119]

The 15th of August was fixed for the cessation of the Government works, as well as the Government relief, because it was considered that relief extended beyond that time would be, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer said, in reply to a question from O’Connell, “an evil of great magnitude.”  When the relief was withdrawn, and the blight had manifested itself in such giant proportions, the friends of the people saw nothing but famine with all its attendant horrors at their doors.  At this time I find the Secretary of the Mallow Relief Committee, the Rev. C.B.  Gibson, calling the urgent attention of the Commissioners of Relief, in Dublin Castle, to the state of his district, and his facts may be taken as a fair specimen of the state of a great portion of the country at the moment.  He had just made a house-to-house visitation of the portion of the country over which the operations of his committee extended, and he says, the people were already starving, their only food being potatoes no larger than marbles, the blight having stopped their growth.  He took some of the best of those potatoes to his house, and found that twelve of them weighed just four ounces and a-half—­merely the weight of one very ordinary sized full-grown potato.  They sickened the people instead of satisfying their hunger.