upon the landed property.”  And again:  “The English plan of out-door relief, in its worst form, will be almost insensibly communicated to Ireland, and their [the proprietors,] estates not only burthened but actually confiscated.”  The remedy for this, he says, is combination amongst the owners of land.  The baronial sessions proved the possibility of such a combination, but they lasted only a part of a day—­there should be a great central permanent committee in Dublin, appointed by the landowners, and communicating between them and the Government.  Such a body would be most influential, and could organize the best plans for obtaining Government and local relief.

Several Relief Committees assembled in Dublin, but not one of them was constituted after the plan suggested by O’Connell, although many influential persons expressed their warm approval of it, one landlord, whilst he did so, offensively applying to its originator the vile quotation:—­fas est ab hoste doceri.

Towards the end of September Mr. Monsell, of Tervoe,[136] addressed a letter to the Irish Chief Secretary, in which he reminds him that the Labour-rate Act was framed and passed into law at a time when the Government did not foresee that the potato rot would be making fearful ravages in every electoral division in Ireland by the first of September;—­that in a number of those there would not be a potato fit to eat on the first of October, and that, in all probability there would not remain in the country any considerable quantity of potatoes suitable for human food by November.  In view of this terrific state of things, he thinks it is no exaggeration to say, that for ten months to come labour must be found for five hundred thousand men, the cost of which could not be under five millions of pounds; and as destitution in the South and West was greater than in the other parts of the country, a great portion of this sum should be raised in Munster and Connaught.  The people were starving, and be the law good or bad they must be employed under it, as it was the only way the poor could, for the time, be relieved.  He reviews the provisions of the Labour-rate Act, and like so many other enlightened men of the period—­whose opinions he may be fairly taken to represent, he is alarmed at the principle of unproductive labour upon which it was based.  The money necessary for the support of the people must, for the most part, be raised from the land, and as this vast sum, so raised, does not “revolve back again upon the land,” it would be impossible, he thought, for the nation to recover from such a shock.  It was universally acknowledged that the want of sufficient capital was one of the great evils—­if not the great evil of Ireland.  There was abundant scope for the profitable expenditure of capital, “in every corner of Ireland—­in every barony—­almost in every townland; the money expended upon its improvement would return a large interest of at least ten per cent., [the usual estimate made by practised men was higher, but he, being anxious to avoid exaggeration, leaves it at ten], and the capital of the country would, of course, be largely increased by such expenditure ...an increasing capital would give more labour, a decreasing capital less.”