to contribute their due proportion; the commercial and monied interests of the country should have been taxed, as well as the land; no one able to bear any portion of the burthen should have been exempted from it, at such a moment of national calamity.  Instead of taxing one species of property, namely land, to meet the Famine, the whole property of the country should have been taxed for that purpose; and this partiality was justly complained of by the landed interests.

But a much more formidable opposition than that of the landed interest, as such, rose up against the Labour-rate Act, and for a very sufficient reason.  The employment to be provided under it could not, and was not intended to be reproductive; the public works which it sanctioned being, as Secretary Labouchere said, in his letter, only undertaken with a view of relieving the temporary distress occasioned by the failure of the potato crop.  On this account, the dissatisfaction with the measure was very general from every section of politicians; not that it was thought, except perhaps by some few, that the Government were unwilling to provide against the great Famine which all felt was already holding the Irish nation in its deadly grasp, but because it was felt and believed, that the mode chosen for that purpose was the very worst possible.  Under the Labour-rate Act, not so much as one rood of ground could be reclaimed or improved.  The whole bone and sinew of the nation, its best and truest capital, must be devoted to the cutting down of hills and the filling up of hollows, often on most unfrequented by-ways, where such work could not be possibly required; and in making roads, which, as the Prime Minister himself afterwards acknowledged, “were not wanted,” but which Colonel Douglas, a Government Inspector, more accurately described “as works which would answer no other purpose than that of obstructing the public conveyances.”  This radical defect of the Act was well and happily put by Lord Devon, when he said it authorized “unproductive work to be executed by borrowed money.”

The Act was criticised for other reasons too.  It made no provision for the completion of the works taken in hand to relieve the people in 1846; and those works must be finished by the 15th of August of that year, or not at all, a full fortnight before the Labour-rate Act had become the law of the land.  Of course many of them were unfinished at that date.  Clearly, this was wrong; for on the supposition that they were works of at least some utility, and not mere child’s-play to afford an excuse to the Government for giving the people the price of food, they should have been completed.  They consisted chiefly in the making or altering or improving of roads—­and everybody knows that unfinished road-work is worse than useless,—­it is a positive injury.  Parts of innumerable roads in Ireland were impassable for years after those works had closed; and many a poor man, whose horse and dray got locked in the adhesive mud of a cut-down but unshingled hill, vented his anger against the Board of Works in the most indignant terms.