and Scotland."[216] This association received in subscriptions, at home
and abroad, over L600,000. The balance in hands, when they drew up
their report, was the very trifling one of fourteen hundred pounds;
whilst so many of those more immediately connected with this gigantic
work laboured gratuitously, that the whole expense of management was
only L12,000, barely two per cent. Further on, I shall have an
opportunity of speaking more in detail of charitable committees.

There is one curious fact regarding the Government in connection with
those committees. It is this: The Government seemed anxious to have it
understood, that it was not the money outlay which concerned or alarmed
them, but the difficulty of procuring food, and the probability of not
being able to procure it in sufficient quantity, by any amount of
exertion within their power. "Last year," writes Mr. Trevelyan, "it was
a money question, and we were able to buy food enough to supply the
local deficiency; but this year it is a food question. The stock of food
for the whole United Kingdom is much less than is required; and if we
were to purchase for Irish use faster than we are now doing, we should
commit a crying injustice to the rest of the country." And again, in the
same letter: "I repeat that it is not a money question. If twice the
value of all the meal which has been, or will be, bought, would save the
people, it would be paid for at once."[217] In face of this assertion,
our Government, as we have already seen, allowed the French, Belgians,
and Dutch, who were in far less need than we, to be in the food markets
before them, and to buy as much as they required--even in Liverpool,
which they cleared of Indian corn in a single day. If food were the
difficulty, and not money, it is not easy to see what great advantage
there was in those charitable associations, formed to receive _money_
subscriptions for the purchase of food. Of what use was money, if food
were not procurable with it? The aid of such bodies, in investigating
cases of destitution and distributing food, would, no doubt, be very
valuable; but this service they could render the Government as well
without subscriptions as with them. Writing to Sir R. Routh, in
December, 1846, Mr. Trevelyan says: "I have continued to forward the
plan of a private subscription, as far as it lay in my power, both in
Ireland and in England; and Sir George Grey (Home Secretary) has
rendered his more powerful assis