From December 27, in 1846, to the middle of April, in 1847, the number of human beings that died in the Cork workhouse was 2,130!  And in the third week of the following month the free interments in the Mathew cemetery had risen to 277—­as many as sixty-seven having been buried in one day.  The destruction of human life in other workhouses of Ireland kept pace with the appalling mortality in the Cork workhouse.  According to official returns, it had reached in April the weekly average of twenty-five per 1,000 inmates; the actual number of deaths being 2,706 for the week ending April 3, and 2,613 in the following week.  Yet the number of inmates in the Irish workhouses was but 104,455 on April 10.

The size of the unions was a great impediment to the working of the poor law.  They were three times the extent of the corresponding divisions in England.  In Munster and Connaught, where there was the greatest amount of destitution, and the least amount of local agency available for its relief, the unions were much larger than in the more favoured provinces of Ulster and Leinster.  The union of Ballina comprised a region of upwards of half a million acres, and within its desert tracts the famine assumed its most appalling form, the workhouse being more than forty miles distant from some of the sufferers.  As a measure of precaution, the Government had secretly imported and stored a large quantity of Indian corn, as a cheap substitute for the potato, which would have served the purpose much better had the people been instructed in the best modes of cooking it.  It was placed in commissariat, along depots the western coast of the island, where the people were not likely to be supplied on reasonable terms through the ordinary channels of trade.  The public works consisted principally of roads, on which, the men were employed as a sort of supplement to the poor law.  Half the cost was a free grant from the treasury, and the other half was charged upon the barony in which the works were undertaken.  The expense incurred under the ‘Labour Rate Act, 9 and 10 Viet. c. 107,’ amounted to 4,766,789 l.  It was almost universally admitted, when the pressure was over, that the system of public works adopted was a great mistake; and it seems wonderful that such grievous blunders could have been made with so many able statesmen and political economists at the head of affairs and in the service of the Government.  The public works undertaken consisted in the breaking up of good roads to level hills and fill hollows, and the opening of new roads in places where they were not required—­works which the people felt to be useless, and at which they laboured only under strong compulsion, being obliged to walk to them in all weathers for miles, in order to earn the price of a breakfast of Indian meal.  Had the labour thus comparatively wasted been devoted to the draining, sub-soiling, and fencing of the farms, connected with a comprehensive system of arterial drainage, immense