Mr. Monsell concluded his able letter in the following words:—­“I am convinced that these evils cannot be avoided without a change in the law.  No matter how the managing of the public works may be extended, you will still find that unless there is an absolute power given to the owners and occupiers of land, to have the money raised from the land expended upon it, you will have such a mass of jobbing and jealousy to contend with, that very few works of private benefit, very few productive works, will be executed.  I am sure that if you agree with the views that have now been laid before you, you will announce it speedily in order to prevent the carrying out of the present ruinous system on any scale larger than that required to meet our immediate wants, and that you will not hesitate to recommend that Parliament should be called together at once.  This course may be inconvenient, but such an emergency requires inconveniences to be encountered.  History presents no parallel to our circumstances.  There is no other instance on record of the whole food of a people becoming rotten before it was ripe.  Of course the system of public works would go on more smoothly than any other that can be suggested.  It would give far less trouble to the Government than the system which it is proposed to substitute for it; but what would the end of it be?  Never since the connexion of Ireland with England has so awful a power been placed in the hands of any statesman as in yours.  The whole country is, as it were, fused in your hands—­on you depends the future shape which it will assume.  If you use your opportunities well—­if you develope its resources—­if you increase its capital—­if you improve its agriculture—­if you distribute its wealth as it ought to be distributed, its progress in the next two or three years will be greater than the progress ever made by any country in the same time.  If you take the easy course—­if you throw away the opportunity placed by Providence in your hands—­if you allow the vast sums of money which you have to direct the distribution of to be spent unprofitably, we shall retrograde as fast as under the other alternative we should have advanced; and those who have been year after year hoping against hope, and labouring against the tide, will fold their arms in despair.”

A deputation from Cork waited on the Prime Minister to urge upon his attention the utility and necessity of employing the people in productive instead of non-productive works.  He read to them a reply, in which he said he thought the measures that had passed through Parliament ought to be sufficient to meet the existing emergency; but whilst he expressed this view he, using the time-honored official style of replying to deputations, promised that the subject should receive the deepest consideration during the ensuing session of Parliament.  There were, he said, subjects of great difficulty to be encountered in legislating for a country circumstanced as Ireland