and lasting benefit to the country would have been the result, especially as works so well calculated to ameliorate the soil, and guard against the moisture of the climate, might have been connected with a system of instruction in agricultural matters of which the peasantry stood so much in need, and to the removal of the gross ignorance which had so largely contributed to bring about the famine.  As it was, enormous sums were wasted.  Much needless hardship was inflicted on the starving people in compelling them to work in frost and rain when they were scarcely able to walk, and, after all the vast outlay, very few traces of it remained in permanent improvements on the face of the country.  The system of government relief works failed chiefly through the same difficulty which impeded every mode of relief, whether public or private—­namely, the want of machinery to work it.  It was impossible suddenly to procure an efficient staff of officers for an undertaking of such enormous magnitude—­the employment of a whole people.  The overseers were necessarily selected in haste; many of them were corrupt, and encouraged the misconduct of the labourers.  In many cases the relief committees, unable to prevent maladministration, yielded to the torrent of corruption, and individual members only sought to benefit their own dependants.  The people everywhere flocked to the public works; labourers, cottiers, artisans, fishermen, farmers, men, women, and children—­all, whether destitute or not, sought for a share of the public money.  In such a crowd, it was almost impossible to discriminate properly.  They congregated in masses on the roads, idling under the name of work, the really destitute often unheeded and unrelieved because they had no friend to recommend them.  All the ordinary employments were neglected; there was no fishing, no gathering of sea-weed, no collecting of manure.  The men who had employment feared to lose it by absenting themselves for any other object; those unemployed spent their time in seeking to obtain it.  The whole industry of the country seemed to be engaged in road-making.  It became absolutely necessary to put an end to it, or the cultivation of the land would be neglected.  Works undertaken on the spur of the moment, not because they were needful, but merely to employ the people, were in many cases ill chosen, and the execution equally defective.  The labourers, desirous to protract their employment, were only anxious to give as little labour as possible, in which their overlookers or gangers in many cases heartily agreed.  The favouritism, the intimidation, the wholesale jobbing practised in many cases were shockingly demoralising.