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.

The Government depots already in existence, as well as those to be established, were only to be in aid of the regular corn and meal trade; and no supplies were to be sold from them, until it was proved to the satisfaction of the Assistant Commissary-General of the district that the necessity for so doing was urgent, and that no other means of obtaining food existed.  This rule was, in some instances, kept so stringently, that people died of starvation within easy distance of those depots, with money in their hands to buy the food that would not be sold to them.  The Treasury, rather than Commissary-General Routh or his subordinates, was to blame for this; their strong determination, many times expressed, being, that food accumulated by Government should be husbanded for the spring and summer months of 1847, when they expected the greatest pressure would exist.  This was prudence, but prudence founded on ignorance of the real state of things in the closing months of 1846.  The dearth of food which they were looking forward to in the coming spring and summer arose fully FIVE MONTHS before the time fixed by the Government; but they were so slow, or so reluctant to realize its truth, that great numbers of people were starved to death before Christmas, because the Government locked up the meal in their depots, in order to keep the same people alive with it in May and June!  “It is most important,” says a Treasury Minute—­these were the days of Treasury Minutes—­“it is most important that it should be remembered, that the supplies provided for the Government depots are not intended to form the primary or principal means of subsistence to the people of the districts in which the depots are established, but merely to furnish a last resource, when all other means of subsistence, whether derived from the harvest just got in, or from importations, are exhausted,