their Report of 1836 came to the conclusion that the English
workhouse system would be unsuitable for Ireland, because after
unchecked demoralisation by profuse out-door relief _in England,
the Work-house system was devised in order to make the lazy and
idle seek ordinary employment which could be got. The situation in
Ireland was, on the contrary, one in which the able-bodied and
healthy were willing and anxious to work for any wages, even for
twopence a day, but were unable to obtain such or any employment_."

Ireland at the end of a generation of Unionism was suffering, as the
commissioners proceed to point out, not from over-population, but from
under-development. They tabled two sets of recommendations. The relief
programme advised compulsory provision for the sick, aged, infirm,
lunatics, and others incapable of work; in all essential matters it
anticipated in 1836 that Minority Report which to the England of 1912
still seems extravagantly humane. The prevention programme outlined a
scheme for the development of Irish resources. Including, as it did,
demands for County Fiscal Boards, agricultural education, better
cottages for the labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in the
land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag into which British
ministers have been dipping without acknowledgment ever since. But the
report itself was, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to
stand a chance. There was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, who,
after a six weeks flutter through the country, devised the Poor Law
System under which we still labour. Mr Nicholls afterwards became Sir
George, and when he died it is probable that a statue was erected to
him. If that is so the inscription must always remain inadequate until
this is added: "Having understood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave
her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the workhouse."