The Royal Agricultural Society of Ireland, a society mainly representing landlord and aristocratic views, of which the Duke of Leinster was president, took up, as became it, the great labour question of the moment.  A deputation from that body waited on the Lord Lieutenant, on the 25th of September, and laid its views before his Excellency.  The members of the deputation open the interview at the Viceregal Lodge by enunciating the good and sound principle, “that it is the clear and imperative duty of the possessors of property in Ireland, to avert from their poor fellow-countrymen the miseries of famine; and that they, therefore, willingly acquiesce in the imposition upon them of any amount of taxation necessary for that purpose.”  They go on to say, that as a very large sum must be raised on the security of Irish property, and expended upon labour, during the continuance of the distress occasioned by the failure of the potato crop, the expenditure of this sum upon unproductive works will increase the disproportion already existing between labour and capital in the country; which disproportion they look on as the main cause of the want of employment for the people, and of the miserable wages they are sustained by.  Reproductive work, they continue, is the only work on which the labour of the population ought to be employed, and plenty of such work was to be found in every part of the country.  It would improve the soil, and return the ratepayers a large interest for the capital expended.  The Board of Works, they suggest, might be empowered to postpone the public works ordered by the presentment sessions, whenever they saw fit, and also to suspend the portion of money voted for that purpose on any townland, and have it applied to the carrying out of reproductive works, according to the requisition of the owners and ratepayers of such townland; such works, in every case, to be approved of by at least three-fourths of the ratepayers.

Lord Bessborough gave a short, and, of course, a cautious answer to the deputation, saying that he would give his best consideration to the proposal; consult the Government, and in a few days let them know the result.  The “Labouchere Letter,” authorizing reproductive works, was the response to this memorial of the Royal Agricultural Society.  But it received another answer, and that from the Prime Minister himself.  The question of productive and non-productive labour was so important, that, some time after the publication of the Labouchere Letter, Lord John Russell discussed it, in a communication addressed by him to the Duke of Leinster, as president of the Royal Agricultural Society.