the new committees were organized; how the boilers were set up, the fires lighted, and the soup made and distributed to three quarters of a million of people; how those people discussed its flavour and qualities, and how they had had time to give expression to their views, and how those views reached the Irish Secretary in London before the 29th of March, are things which could be only explained by the Irish Secretary himself.  This fact, however, was known to the general public, that on the 23rd of March there was not a quart of the new relief-system soup yet made in Ireland; and that on the 29th, at the moment the Secretary was answering Smith O’Brien, it is more than probable that the fact was still the same.

The promise which Mr. O’Brien said the Government was understood to have made, and which Mr. Labouchere treats so cavalierly in his reply, was contained in the following words, spoken by the First Minister on bringing forward the new Relief Bill:—­“We must take care—­and the Lord Lieutenant is prepared to take care—­that the substitution of this system for public works shall be made as easy in the transition as possible.  There will be no rude dismissal of the people at once, who otherwise might find great difficulty in obtaining subsistence; but when the arrangements are made for carrying the scheme I have described into effect, it will be provided that no further presentments shall be made, and no new public works undertaken."[262] These are strong words, and were certainly meant to convey that there was to be no interregnum in which the people would be left to starve between the cessation of the public works and the establishment of the new system of relief.

But the most curious part of Mr. Labouchere’s explanation is the extract from Colonel Jones’s letter.  In the Colonel’s opinion it was a great mistake of the Dublin press to assume that the men discharged from the works had been deprived, in an instant, of their daily food.  No such, thing:  it was gross ignorance or wilful calumny to assert it.  The dismissed labourers, Colonel Jones tells us, had no right to claim their wages till Tuesday or Wednesday, yet he generously pays them on the Saturday—­two or three days before!  But did he pay them for the Monday and the Tuesday?—­not a word about that.  Then where was the generosity?  The order was that the men were to be dismissed on Saturday, the 20th of March, and Colonel Jones’s vast bounty consisted in paying them the day he dismissed them, instead of compelling them to loiter about two or three days waiting to be paid.  It well became Colonel Jones, indeed, to brag of such an act, in face of the many inquests at which such verdicts as this were returned:—­“Died of hunger, in consequence of not being paid by the Board of Works, a fortnight’s wages being due at the time of death.”