of the 19th century.  He then went into some figures to show how vast the operations of the Board of Works were.  At present, he said, they had 11,587 officials, and half a million of people at work, at a weekly cost of between seven and eight hundred thousand pounds.  He took up the objections against the Labour-rate Act, and the reproductive works authorized by the “Labouchere Letter.”  Very soon after the Labour-rate Act had come into operation there came, he said, on the part of the proprietors and country gentlemen of Ireland, a complaint that the works were useless, that they were not wanted, and that they were not reproductive.  The First Minister, strange to say, did not attach any great value to these objections.  “I think,” he said, “the object being relief, and to combine relief with a certain amount of work, to show that habits of industry have not been entirely abandoned, that the productive nature of the work was a question of secondary importance.  We spend in Ireland upwards of L1,000,000 a-year in poor-rates, and I do not believe that if enquiry were made it would be found that any productive works were the result.”  So much the worse; and it was one of the great objections to the Irish Poor-law system, that under it no provision was made for the profitable employment of able-bodied paupers.  To call the productiveness or non-productiveness of the labour of half a million of men a matter of secondary importance was, certainly, most cool assurance on the part of a professed political economist, who must hold as a central dogma of that science that labour is the principal producer of capital.  Everybody admitted that the crying want of Ireland was the want of capital; yet here is a Minister, holding in his hands her destinies during a life-and-death struggle for existence, and an ardent disciple of Adam Smith besides, expressing his belief that to expend in useless and even pernicious works the labour of half a million of men was a matter of secondary importance; and because it was, he did not attach any great weight to the objection!  It was not, therefore, he said, such an objection that caused the Government to sanction a modification of the law as was announced in the letter of the Irish Chief Secretary, but because it was desirable to obtain the co-operation of the landed gentry of Ireland, and, if possible, to have the labour made reproductive, that the plan of reproductive works was sanctioned.  But this plan did not win the Irish landowners, and they began a new agitation for townland divisions.  On this point he quoted the following passage from a letter of Smith O’Brien, in which the Prime Minister said he fully concurred:  “This plan had the merit of being intelligible, simple, and effective.  It is undoubtedly better that the population should be so employed than in destroying good land, by making new lines of road which are wholly unnecessary, or in otherwise doing absolute mischief.  It will, however, have the effect of still further