Page:Annalsoffaminein00nich.djvu/68

62 a promise was made, that the money paid for them should be refunded when the sacks were returned. This was immediately done; but the money was withheld with no other explanation, but that I must sell meal enough to pay for them. This meal was the property of the poor, and a property most sacred, because life was suspended on it, and the meal was sent in the best manner to preserve it, and taking it out injured it most seriously, and sometimes fatally, and the article taken from their hungry mouths to pay for sacks, was, besides robbing them of their own, deducting so much from life. I could not, I dare not, and I did not comply.

This circumstance is important, not only because it involves a great principle, but as furnishing a solution, as far as it goes, why the poor were so little benefited by the bounties sent them from abroad. The hungry, it should be borne in mind, for whom these donations were sent, had no control of what was virtually their own exclusively, but must be content to receive it by proxy, in great or small parcels, in a good or bad state, at the dispenser's option; consequently, they did not always have what belonged to them, and if the meal and rice paid for the sacks, as mine were required to do, a great deduction must be made from the original amount. I once heard a woman observe, whose husband had large donations intrusted to him, that they had £200 worth of sacks, which must be paid for out of the meal, as they could not do it. These two facts are the only tangible ones on this