The number of Relief Committees in operation throughout the country at the close of 1846, was about one thousand. Indeed, everything connected with the Public Works and the Famine tends to impress one with their gigantic proportions;--even the correspondence, the state of which is thus given by the Board in the middle of December: "The letters received averaged 800 a-day, exclusive of letters addressed to individual members of the Board, on public business; the number received on the last day of November was 2,000; to-day, (17th December,) two thousand five hundred." All this notwithstanding, the Famine was but very partially stayed: on it went, deepening, widening, desolating, slaying, with the rapidity and certainty which marked the progress of its predecessor, the Blight. The numbers applying for work without being able to obtain it, were fearfully enormous. From a memorandum supplied by the Board of Works to Sir Randolph Routh, the head of the Commissariat Department, dated the 17th of December, we learn that the labourers then employed were about 350,000, whilst the number on Relief Lists (for employment) was about 500,000,--that is, there were 150,000 persons on the lists seeking work, who could not, or at least who did not, get it. Those 150,000 may be taken to represent at least half a million of starving people;--how many more were there at the moment, whose names never appeared on any list, except the death-roll! FOOTNOTES: [139] Commissariat Series of Blue Books, Correspondence, vol. I., pp. 80 and 83. [140] _Ib._ p. 98. [141] _Morning Chronicle_ quoted in _Freeman's Journal_ of October 7th, 1846. The _Standard_, commenting on a letter which appeared in the _Times_ shortly before on the same subject, and written in the same spirit of hostility to the Irish people, says it would be "indecent" at any time; at present it is "intolerably offensive" and "greatly mischievous." "That the Irish are not naturally an idle race," continues the _Standard_, "every man may satisfy himself in London streets, and in the streets of all our great towns, where nearly all the most toilsome work is performed by Irish labourers." [142] Letter in Commissariat Series of Blue Books, vol. I., p. 360. [143] _Ib._ p. 349. [144] Afterwards Sir Thomas Redington, Knt. [145] Mr. Brett, County Surveyor of Mayo to the Board of Works. Board of Works Series of Blue Books, vol. L, p. 125. [146] "_Employment_, with wages in _cash_ is the general outcry."--_Com. Gen. Hewitson to Mr. Trevelyan; Commissariat Series, p. 12._