To this example of the efficiency of the workhouse in preventing undue applications for relief, may be added the testimony of the relief commissioners appointed under _The 10th and 11th Vict. cap. 7_,[164] as to the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility in the state of Ireland at that time, of guarding against gross abuse in the administration of relief without the corrective of the workhouse test, even although in the shape of daily rations of cooked food. In their third Report dated 17th June 1847, the commissioners make the following remarkable statement—“In several instances the government inspecting officers found no difficulty in striking off hundreds of names that ought not to have been placed on the lists, including sometimes those of servants and men in the constant employ of persons of considerable station and property. These latter are frequently themselves members of the committees, and in some cases the very chairmen, being magistrates, have sanctioned the issue of rations to tenants of their own of considerable holdings, possessed of live stock, and who it was found had paid up their last half-year’s rent.”... “In other districts, the measure is subject to deception and petty frauds practised by many of the order immediately above the class of actually destitute, and which cannot be entirely checked by the best exertions of the best committees. Even in the districts where the service is most correctly performed, the numbers on the lists will no doubt exceed those of the really destitute.” It was perhaps to be expected under the circumstances then existing in Ireland, that something like what is here described might occur; but it could hardly have been expected that it would have been to such an extent, or that persons in the positions named would have descended to practices at once so disgraceful and so unpatriotic. Against such frauds the workhouse seemed to be the only safeguard. ----- [164] Ante, p. 317. ----- [Sidenote: Expenditure on relief of the poor.]