Lord George Bentinck proposed that sixteen millions should be advanced for the construction of railroads, so as to give employment and wages to the starving multitudes. The Government, however, objected that such relief would operate at too great a distance, in most cases, from the homes of the people; and it was urged by independent critics that a State loan for railways would really be for the relief of the landlords more than of the peasantry. The large sums actually voted were spent in road-making and in procuring food and medical relief. A Board of Works directed the relief-works. A Commissariat, with two thousand Relief Committees under it, directed the distribution of food. A Board of Health provided temporary fever-hospitals and additional physicians. It was not to be expected that this machinery would work well, and, in fact, the public relief was costly in its administration and often misdirected in its objects. Private charities, especially that of the Society of Friends, gave invaluable help, money being subscribed by all classes at home and sent from distant countries, including a thousand pounds from the Sultan of Turkey. On one day, the third of July, 1847, nearly three millions in Ireland received food gratuitously from the hands of the relieving officers. In March, 1847, the public works were employing 734,000. The number relieved out of the poor rates at one time reached 800,000. Workhouses were enlarged, and temporary fever-hospitals were built to the number of 207, which in the two years 1847 and 1848, received 279,723 patients. Emigration to the United States and Canada, which had averaged 61,242 persons per annum from the last half of 1841 to the end of 1845, rose steadily all through the famine until it reached a total of 214,425 in the year 1849, the passage money to the amount of millions sterling having come largely from the savings of the Irish already settled in the New World. The grand effect of the famine upon the population of Ireland was revealed by the census of 1851. The people in 1841 had numbered 8,175,124; in 1851 they numbered 6,515,794. The decrease was 28·6 per cent. in Connaught, 23·5 per cent. in Munster, 16 per cent. in Ulster, and 15·5 per cent. in Leinster. In many remote parishes the number of inhabitants, and of cabins, fell to nearly a half. The depopulation was wholly rural, so much so that there was a positive increase of inhabitants not only in the large county towns, but even in small towns such as Skull and Kanturk, situated in Poor Law unions where the famine and epidemics had made the greatest clearances all over[501]. Our business here is with the epidemical maladies, which contributed to this depopulation; but a few words remain to be said on the subject at large.