The accounts of the unions in which workhouses were in operation were severally audited by the assistant-commissioners, and duly reported upon. These reports showed the working of the system in all its details, pointing out and commenting upon the good and bad parts of the administration, and exhibiting and explaining the general results. The audit reports are in fact calculated to afford a complete view of the working of the Poor-law, wherever the administration of relief under its provisions had been brought into operation. Several of these were appended to the fourth annual Report. [Sidenote: Amount of expenditure and number relieved.] The expenditure on relief of the poor during the previous year, and the numbers relieved on the 1st of January, in the four unions then in operation, of which an account has been given,[106] was in the year ending January 1st 1842 as follows— Number in the house on the 1st January 1842. Cork £11,775 1881 North Dublin 14,643 1940 South Dublin 15,613 2124 Londonderry 3,711 385 _______ ____ £45,742 Total 6,330 These unions may therefore be considered as being in orderly working, and equal to the duties imposed upon them by the Poor Relief Act. Thirty-three other unions in different parts of the country were likewise in operation during a portion of the year, longer or shorter according to the respective orders of declaration; and the expenditure in these unions down to the same date as the above, had amounted to 64,535_l._, the number of inmates in the several workhouses at that time being 8,916, of which number 1,310 were in the Limerick house. It thus appears that at the commencement of 1842, after somewhat more than two years’ preparation, workhouse relief was administered in 37 unions, to 15,246 destitute persons, at an expense of 110,277_l._—a result which, having regard to all circumstances, could hardly fail of being deemed satisfactory, and as holding out a promise of the early maturing of the other unions, all of which had been declared and were in progress of organization. ----- [106] Ante, p. 263. ----- [Sidenote: Collection of the rate.]