and the depots are, therefore, in no case to be drawn upon while food can be obtained by purchase from private parties."[163] This Minute is addressed to Sir Randolph Routh, who had written to the Treasury ten days before, pressing upon them the necessity of large and immediate purchases of corn.  “We have no arrivals yet announced,” he says, “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.”  And further on in the same letter:  “We began our operations on the 1st of September or thereabouts; and here, in the midst of harvest, before any Commissariat arrangement for supplies from abroad could be matured, we find the country besieging our depot for food, and scarcely a proprietor stirring in their behalf."[164]

Government depots were only to be established where it was probable that private enterprise would not offer a sufficient quantity of food for sale.  On this principle, the north, east, and south were left to be supplied through the usual channels of commerce; the depot system being confined to the west coast.  What was meant precisely by the west coast does not seem to have been settled at the outset, but in answer to an enquiry from Sir R. Routh on the subject, the Treasury, on the 31st of October, defined it to be the country to the west of the Shannon, with the County Donegal to the north, and Kerry to the south, with a small corner of Cork, as far as Skibbereen, because that town was on the western coast.[165]

We have seen the rapid increase of labourers on the Relief Works from October to December, yet famine was always far ahead of the Government.  Their arrangements for the first famine year were made with reference to the closing of all operations at harvest time, in 1846, but there was no harvest that year for the poor; their crop had vanished before the destroyer, and they were actually worse off at the end of August, 1846, than they had been since the beginning of the Potato Blight.  In that year, the potatoes never came to maturity at all, and any that were thought worth the labour of digging, were hurried to market, and sold for any price they fetched, before they would melt away in the owners’ hands.  One of the Commissariat officers asked a farmer’s wife, who was selling potatoes of this kind, what was the price of them; “two pence a stone, sir,” she replied, “is my price,” but lowering her voice, she naively added, “to tell you the truth, sir, they are not worth a penny.”  Even in September—­it was on the 18th of that month—­a resolution was passed by the Mallow Relief Committee, that from information laid