The poor-rate was quite inadequate to support the burden thrown upon it by the suspension of public works, but there was another claim upon it which could not wait.  When the elections were over and the Government majority secure, the Treasury called on the poor-law guardians to levy immediately a special rate for the repayment of a million and a quarter lent by the State in a previous year.  They were warned that, if they refused, their boards would be dissolved and the rates levied by the authority of the Commissioners.  The guardians in many districts declared that an additional rate could not be collected.  All that could be got would be too little to support the distressed class.  But the Treasury would listen to no excuse, and a dozen boards were dissolved and paid guardians put in their place.  The Treasury had lent seven millions sterling in 1846; five millions of it had been spent in making roads which were not needed nor desired, and one million was diverted from the wages fund to purchase land for this experiment.  The aid which the stronger country proposed to give to the weaker, from the Treasury to which both contributed, was the remission of one-third of this debt.  A blunder in foreign policy, the escapade of an ambitious minister in India or Africa, has cost the British taxpayer more in a month than he spent to save millions of fellow-subjects beyond the Irish Sea.

When the increased mortality was pressed on the attention of the Government, Lord John Russell replied that the owners of property in Ireland ought to support the poor born on their estates.  It was a perfectly just proposition if the ratepayers were empowered to determine the object and method of the expenditure; but prohibiting productive work, and forcing them to turn strong men into paupers and keep them sweltering in workhouses instead of laboring to reclaim the waste lands—­this was not justice.  The Times, commenting on the new policy, declared that Ireland was as well able to help herself as France or Belgium, and that the whole earth was doing duty for inhuman Irish landlords.  An unanswerable case, if Ireland, like France and Belgium, had the power of collecting and applying her own revenue; otherwise not difficult to answer.

The people fled before the famine to England, America, and the British colonies.  They carried with them the seed of disease and death.  In England a bishop and more than twenty priests died of typhus, caught in attendance on the sick and dying.  The English people clamored against such an infliction, which it cannot be denied would be altogether intolerable if these fugitives were not made exiles and paupers by English law.  They were ordered home again, that they might be supported on the resources of their own country; for though we had no country for the purpose of self-government and self-protection, we were acknowledged to have a country when the necessity of bearing burdens arose.