within their reach, to save the Irish people.  Besides the mistakes they made as to the nature of the employment which ought to be given, a chief fault of their’s was that they did not take time by the forelock—­that they did not act with promptness and decision.  Other nations, where famine was far less imminent, were in the markets, and had to a great extent made their purchases before our Government, causing food to be scarcer and dearer for us than it needed to be.  Thus writes Commissary-General Routh to the Treasury on the 19th of September:—­“I now revert to the most important of our considerations, the state of our depots.  We have no arrivals yet announced, either at Westport or Sligo, and the remains there must be nothing, or next to nothing.  The bills of lading from Mr. Erichsen are all for small quantities, which will be distributed, and perhaps eaten, in twelve or twenty-four hours after their arrival.  It would require a thousand tons to make an impression, and that only a temporary one.  Our salvation of the depot system is in the importation of a large supply.  These small shipments are only drops in the ocean.”  The Treasury replies in this fashion, on the 22nd, to Sir R. Routh’s strong appeal:—­“With reference to the remarks in your letter of the 19th instant, as to the insufficiency of the supplies for your depots, the fact is that we have already bought up and sent to Ireland all the Indian corn which is immediately available; and the London and Liverpool markets are at present so completely bare of this article, that we have been obliged to have recourse to the plan of purchasing supplies of Indian corn which had been already exported from London to neighbouring Continental ports."[139] And again, on the 29th of the same month, Mr. Trevelyan thus explains the difficulties the Treasury laboured under in endeavouring to purchase the supplies for which the Commissary-General had been so emphatically calling:—­“It is little known what a formidable competition we are suffering from our Continental neighbours.  Very large orders are believed to have been sent out to the United States, not only by the merchants, but by the Governments of France and Belgium, and in the Mediterranean markets they have secured more than their share; all which will appear perfectly credible, when it is remembered that they are buying our new English wheat in our own market."[140]

Here at home, the fatal error of awaiting events, instead of anticipating them, and by forethought endeavouring to control and guide them, was equally pernicious.  The most considerable persons in the kingdom—­peers, members of Parliament, deputy lieutenants, magistrates without number—­pronounced the potato crop of 1846 to be hopelessly gone early in August.  But although several members of the Government expressed their belief in this, and spoke about it with great alarm, they seem not to have given it full credence, until it was too late to take anticipatory measures;