Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/57

54 to say that this country at least expects it of you), then allow me to suggest that not a moment should be lost in providing the means of fulfilling the engagements contracted by you with the people of both Ireland and England in the new Poor-law.

There are many districts in the south and west of Ireland where, if no such precautions are taken, that law will become a dead letter, nay, worse, a delusion and a fraud—long before the winter is over, from the impossibility of collecting rates, perhaps even of finding property to seize for them in the possession of the occupying tenantry, who are alone liable in the first instance for the whole. The crops, at this moment filling their haggards, will have been sold, or seized and removed, for rent or arrears of rent. The tenants will in many cases have barely enough left to live <m and to seed their land with. To take that would only add them to the list of paupers or claimants for relief. What will remain, but the same alternatives which last year presented themselves to your option, namely, either to allow the poor to starve, or to undertake to relieve them by public money?

That any should be allowed to starve, as so many starved last year, in spite of the millions sent over from this country to prevent such a calamity, I hold to be impossible. After the ample warning which the occurrences of the past two years have afforded to your government of the necessity of providing against such a contingency, the actual' star-