You never, gentlemen, laboured under a more egregious
mistake than by imagining that we could give in our adhesion to your
principles, or could have any, the least confidence, in anything
proceeding from you. Is not the _ex-officio_ clause in the Poor-law
Bill your bantling, or that of your leader, Lord Stanley? Is not the
quarter of an acre clause test for relief your creation? Were not the
most conspicuous names on your committee the abettors of an amendment as
iniquitous as it was selfish--viz., to remove the poor-rates from their
own shoulders to that of their pauper tenantry? Are not they the same
members who recently advocated, in the House of Commons, the
continuation of the fag-end of the bloody penal code of the English
statute book, by which our English brethren could be transported or
hanged for professing the creed of their conscience, the most forward in
this Catholic emigration plan? What good could we expect from such a
Nazareth?"[289]
The Prime Minister did not take up the great colonization scheme. He
said, in the House of Commons, on the 29th of April, that he declined,
on the part of the Government, assuming the responsibility of providing
for the absorption of the great excess of labour then existing in
Ireland.
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