The Irish Relief Bill was introduced on the 7th, and read a second time on the 23rd of February. It granted loans to the amount of £1,092,985 without interest for two years and a half, but bearing 1 per cent. interest after that time, to landlords and sanitary authorities for works of improvement; it also permitted the Baronial Sessions to start such works, and relaxed the law of out-door relief. Most of the Irish members complained that as a measure of relief, the Bill was inadequate. Some, like Mr. Synan, objected to the loans being taken from the Irish Church surplus. Others wished Boards of Guardians to be able to give out-door relief in money, and to take up loans for improvements. The Bill was passed on the 15th of March, and Major Nolan also passed a Seed Bill which enabled poor farmers to get seeds on loan. It is now clear that the Government had no true conception of the state of Ireland. They had been satisfied with the jaunty assurances of the Chief Secretary, Mr. Lowther, in the previous year, that there was no exceptional agrarian distress in that country. Yet, as a matter of fact, a famine was imminent, and at the beginning of 1880 the Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, and Mr. E. Dwyer Gray, Lord Mayor of Dublin, were compelled to start Relief Funds to avert that dreadful calamity. Even with this evidence before them, the Tory Ministry in 1880 fell into a blunder worthy of the Whigs in 1847-9. They adopted the fatal Whig principle, that the best way to relieve the Irish peasant’s distress was to vote the relief money to be doled out in wages by his landlord, who, by rack-renting and evictions had aggravated that distress, and who, though in most cases an absentee, was yet for some inexplicable reason supposed to be the best almoner the State could find in Ireland.[156] That this mistake was made can only be accounted for by the fact that Lord Beaconsfield’s advanced age, and his absorption in Foreign Affairs, rendered it possible for his less competent colleagues to control his policy.[157]