"[161] Just about the same time, Assistant Commissary-General
Dobree reports to the same quarter: "It is superfluous to make any
further report on the potato crop, for I believe the failure is general
and complete throughout the country, though the disease has made more
rapid progress in some places than in others. In a circuit of two
hundred miles, I have not seen one single field free from it; and
although it is very speculative to attempt a calculation on what is not
yet absolutely realized, my belief is that scarcely any of the late
potatoes will be fit for human food."[162]
Considerable stores of oatmeal and Indian corn remained in the
Government depots throughout the country, when they were closed in
August. By a Treasury Minute, these were ordered to be concentrated at
six points; two in the interior, namely, Longford and Banagher, and four
on the coast, Limerick, Galway, Westport, and Sligo.
Like the heads of the Board of Works, the Commissariat officials thought
they would have had some time to arrange their various duties, appoint
their subordinates, fit up their offices, such as had any, in a snug and
convenient manner, and print and circulate query sheets without number;
and all this in spite of their own observations and reports--in spite of
this overwhelming fact, which, if they adverted to it at all, does not
seem to have impressed them--namely, that they were in the middle of a
great famine, and not at the beginning of it; that they were entering on
the second year of it with exhausted resources, while the blight which
caused it was far more general and destructive than it had been the year
before; in short, that it was universal, sweeping, immediate, terrible.
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