Sir Randolph Routh, the head of
the Commissariat Department, in a letter to Mr. Trevelyan, the
Assistant-Secretary to the Treasury, says: "In the midst of much real,
there is more fictitious distress; and so much abuse prevails, that if
you check it in one channel, it presents itself in another."[142] Again,
Assistant Commissary-General Milliken, writing to Sir R. Routh from
Galway, informs him that he met a considerable number of carts loaded
with meal and other supplies; and there did not, he said, appear that
extreme want and destitution that he had expected.[143] More than any
other did Lieutenant-Colonel Jones, Chairman of the Board of Works, keep
the idea of exaggerated and fictitious distress before the mind of the
Treasury, although he began his communications in a far different
spirit. Writing on the 1st of September to Mr. Trevelyan, he says: "The
prospects for the ensuing season are melancholy to reflect upon; the
potato crop may now be fairly considered as past; either from disease,
or from the circumstance of the produce being small, it has been
consumed; many families are now living upon food scarcely fit for hogs."
And again: "I am very much afraid that Government will not find _free
trade_, with all the employment we can give, a succedaneum for the loss
of the potato.
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