Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/58

55 of any number of the citizens of a civilused and wealthy community like this—and after a plentiful harvest too—would be a circumstance too disgraceful to our institutions, and the statesmen who administer them, to be contemplated beforehand as possible. Moreover, the executive, over which you preside, is now, by the recent change in the law, rendered directly responsible for preventing any such frightful contingency. If the Board of Guardians of any Union fail to take all the necessary steps for relieving its destitute poor, the Poor-law Commission, now a branch of the Executive, is authorized by the law (and consequently is bound in duty) to dismiss that Board summarily, and appoint its own paid officers to act in its place. If then, hereafter, inquests are held on persons who may have died of starvation through denial of relief, it will no longer be an indecent absurdity, or a mere brutum fulmen should the verdict of the jury declare the Executive guilty of their deaths I The duty which, under the clause I allude to, devolves upon the Poor-law Commission, must extend not merely to doing what can be done on the spur of the moment towards the relief of the poor when obliged to undertake it by the neglect of a Board of Guardians, but also to the exercise of foresight and judgment as to the probability of such an occurrence, and to the making due preparations against it. If, as every one knows to be the fact, there are parts of Ireland where it would be absurd to expect that sufficient