[200] In the Utopia.

[201] “The people are not indolent.  Of that there has been abundant proof.  Give them a definite object, a fair chance of profit, and they will work as well as the people of this or any other country.  Of this I have had ample opportunity of judging, on works where thousands have been employed, both here [England] and in Ireland.”—­A twelve months’ residence in Ireland, during the Famine and the Public Works in 1846-7, by Wm. Henry Smith, C.E., late conducting Civil Engineer of Public Works.—­London, 1848; p. 120.

“A foreign railway company, a few months ago, advertised in the English papers for Irish labourers to work on their lines, where they would receive one-third more wages than the French people themselves were receiving.  He [the Irishman] would do the same amount of work at home, if properly fed; but the principle is much the same as keeping a horse without his oats, and expecting him to get through his work the same as if well fed.  The Irishman at the English harvest, or as a railway labourer, and the London heavy goods or coal porter, is not excelled in his willingness or industry.”—­Ib. 196.

“It is a mistake to suppose the Irish people will not work.  They are both willing and desirous to work, and, when in regular employment, are always peaceable and orderly.”—­His Excellency Lord Clarendon’s Letter to the Lord Mayor of London, on the “Plantation Scheme,” dated Viceregal Lodge, June 26, 1849.

[202] Freeman’s Journal, 23rd June, 1847.

[203] Armagh could be scarcely said to have had any manufactures at this time, as machinery, erected in the large factories of Belfast and other places, had abolished the hand-looms at which the people worked in their cottages, and the linen trade had been greatly depressed for years before; but no doubt there was a time when it was a material help to the inhabitants of that and other Northern counties.

[204] Immediately after the above clause was added to the “Poor Relief (Ireland) Bill,” Lord George Bentinck made the following attack upon the Irish-famine policy of the Government:  “The noble Lord,” says the report, “proceeded to contend that, if the Government had had recourse to the system he had recommended, it would have raised the condition of the people, and the House would not have heard of the tens of thousands and the hundreds of thousands of deaths; but they could not learn from the Government how many, for there was one point upon which the Irish Government were totally ignorant, or which they concealed, which was, the mortality which had occurred during their administration of Irish affairs (hear, hear).  They shrink (continued the noble lord, energetically) from telling us; they are ashamed to tell us.  They know the people have been dying by thousands, and I dare them to inquire what has been the number of those who have died through their mismanagement, their principles of free trade