with a comprehensive system of arterial drainage, immense and lasting
benefit to the country would have been the result, especially as
works so well calculated to ameliorate the soil, and guard against the
moisture of the climate, might have been connected with a system of
instruction in agricultural matters of which the peasantry stood so
much in need, and to the removal of the gross ignorance which had so
largely contributed to bring about the famine. As it was, enormous
sums were wasted. Much needless hardship was inflicted on the starving
people in compelling them to work in frost and rain when they were
scarcely able to walk, and, after all the vast outlay, very few traces
of it remained in permanent improvements on the face of the country.
The system of government relief works failed chiefly through the
same difficulty which impeded every mode of relief, whether public or
private--namely, the want of machinery to work it. It was impossible
suddenly to procure an efficient staff of officers for an undertaking
of such enormous magnitude--the employment of a whole people. The
overseers were necessarily selected in haste; many of them were
corrupt, and encouraged the misconduct of the labourers. In many cases
the relief committees, unable to prevent maladministration, yielded
to the torrent of corruption, and individual members only sought to
benefit their own dependants. The people everywhere flocked to the
public works; labourers, cottiers, artisans, fishermen, farmers, men,
women, and children--all, whether destitute or not, sought for a share
of the public money. In such a crowd, it was almost impossible to
discriminate properly. They congregated in masses on the roads,
idling under the name of work, the really destitute often unheeded
and unrelieved because they had no friend to recommend them. All
the ordinary employments were neglected; there was no fishing, no
gathering of sea-weed, no collecting of manure. The men who had
employment feared to lose it by absenting themselves for any other