In 1823 another select committee[37] was appointed “to inquire into the condition of the labouring poor in Ireland, with a view to facilitate the application of the funds of private individuals and associations for their employment in useful and productive labour.” The committee made their Report on the 16th of July, and after adverting to the course pursued in the former inquiry of 1819, they state that during the last year “a pressure of distress wholly unexampled was felt in Ireland, which directed the attention of government, of parliament, and of the British public, to the condition of the Irish peasantry, and led to the appropriation of large sums voted by the legislature, and subscriptions by individuals for the purpose of mitigating if not of averting, that famine and disease which had extended to so alarming a degree in many districts in Ireland.”[38] ----- [37] Mr. Spring Rice, now Lord Monteagle, was the chairman of this committee. [38] Ante, p. 80. ----- It appears that early in May of the preceding year, a public meeting was held in the city of London to raise subscriptions for the relief of the distress in Ireland, and a committee of gentlemen was appointed to superintend the distribution of the money subscribed. Considerable grants of public money were also made by parliament for the same purpose. The committee state that the distressed districts comprised one-half of the surface of Ireland, and there were grounds for believing that considerably more than one-half of the entire population of these districts depended upon charitable assistance for support. The sums distributed through the city of London committee amounted to nearly 300,000_l._, which with the amount advanced by government furnished means for continuing the relief until the month of August, when the necessity for its further continuance seems to have ceased; and it is satisfactory, the committee observe, to find that the most lively feelings of gratitude have been excited by this benevolent interposition, “which it is to be hoped will tend to unite the two parts of the empire in the strong ties of sympathy and obligation.”