series of measures for the general development of Ireland.  Looking back over nearly eighty years of Irish history, we must be both humbled and astonished by the almost inspired precision and statesmanship of these proposals.  They included reclamation of waste land and the enforcement of drainage; an increased grant to the Board of Works; healthy houses for the labouring classes; local instruction in agriculture; the enlargement of leasing powers with the object of encouraging land improvement, and the transfer of the fiscal powers of Grand Juries to County Boards.  Here we have in embryo the Irish Labourers Acts from 1860 to 1906, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, the Irish Land Acts from 1860 to 1903, the Local Government Act of 1898—­reforms which Ireland owes almost entirely to the statesmanship (though it seems a rather belated statesmanship) of Unionist Governments.  These Irish recommendations were ignored by the Government of the day.  It sent an English Poor Law Commissioner (Mr. Nicholls) to Ireland.  He spent six weeks in the country.  On his return he recommended the establishment of the English Poor Law system there, and it was accordingly established.

The first Poor Law Act for Ireland was passed on July 31, 1838.  Between that year and 1851 one hundred and sixty-three Poor Law Unions were created.  The number is at present one hundred and fifty-nine, and they are administered by elected and co-opted Poor Law Guardians to the number of more than eight thousand.  In every Union there is a workhouse, and in that workhouse all the various classes of destitute and poor persons are maintained.  They include sick, aged and infirm, legitimate and illegitimate children, insane of all classes, sane epileptics, mothers of illegitimate children, able-bodied male paupers, and the importunate army of tramps.  The mean number of such inmates in all the workhouses on any day is about 40,000, of whom about one-third are sick, one-third aged and infirm, one-seventh children, one-twentieth mothers of illegitimate children, and one-twelfth insane and epileptic.  This awful confusion of infirmity and vice, this Purgatory perpetuating itself to the exclusion of all hope of Paradise, presents the vital problem of Irish Poor Law Reform.

A radical solution must be found for it.  On that point the reports of all the Commissions are unanimous.  They differ, where they do differ, only as regards means to the end.

The supreme reform which must be undertaken by any Government that seeks to remove this great blot on Irish administration is the abolition of the present workhouse system on some basis which, while effective, will make no addition to the rates.  The two chief reports (those of the Viceregal Commission and the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws) are in agreement, not merely as to this necessity, but as to the guiding principles of reform.  They recommend classification, by institutions, of all the present inmates of the