“How far the workhouse, if established, may be relied upon as a test of destitution and a measure of the relief to be afforded; how far it will be effectual for the prevention of pauperism, and for stimulating the people to exertion for their own support;—how far, in short, the workhouse system, which has been safely and effectually applied to dispauperise England, may be applied with safety and efficiency to prevent pauperism in Ireland, now remains for inquiry. The governing principle of the workhouse system is this:—that the support which is afforded at the public charge in the workhouse, shall on the whole be less desirable than the support obtained by independent exertion. To carry out this principle, it might seem to be necessary that the inmates of a workhouse should be in all respects worse situated—worse clothed, worse lodged, and worse fed, than the independent labourers of the district. In fact, however, the inmates of our English workhouses are as well clothed, and generally better lodged and better fed than the agricultural labourer and his family: yet the irksomeness of the discipline and confinement, and the privation of certain enjoyments, produce such disinclination to enter the workhouse, that experience warrants the fullest assurance that nothing short of destitution, and that necessity which the law contemplates as the ground for affording relief, will induce the able-bodied labourer to seek refuge therein; and that if driven thither by necessity, he will quit it again as speedily as possible, and strive (generally with increased energy and consequent success) to obtain subsistence by his own efforts.