a pound and selling it at four shillings;[247] and junior commissaries were acting as regimental agents and advancing money to the unhappy officers at exorbitant interest.[248] [Sidenote: Nov. 5.] In such a state of affairs Schomberg, rightly or wrongly, considered himself powerless. William ordered him from time to time to advance on Dublin; and Harbord, with incredible impertinence, urged him to march against the enemy.[249] Schomberg answered William by a plain statement of his condition, and Harbord by a surly and contemptuous growl. In truth his Dutch and Huguenot regiments, which alone were well clad and well looked after by their officers, were the only troops on which he could rely. The English continued to die like flies. Schomberg wisely endeavoured to distract their thoughts from their own misery by keeping them at drill. He found that not one in four had the slightest idea how to load or fire his musket, while the muskets themselves fell to pieces in the handling. Pestilence increased, and with it callousness and insubordination. The men used the corpses of their comrades to stop the draughts under their tent-walls, and robbed any man whose appearance promised hope of gain. Nor was this indiscipline confined to Dundalk. The Enniskilleners, who have generally been represented as superior to the English, were quite as fond of plunder, and robbed William Harbord himself, despite his protestations, in broad daylight.[250] Happily for Schomberg, James's forces were in as ill condition as his own, so that he was able to retire into winter quarters from Dundalk without molestation. Of fourteen thousand men in the camp, upwards of six thousand had perished.[251] Gradually and painfully the winter wore away, but without abatement in the mortality of the troops. Meanwhile the House of Commons, awaking to the terrible state of things in Ireland, addressed the King for the arrest of Shales. William replied that he had already put him under arrest; and the name of Shales was accordingly constantly before the House in the course of the next few months, but without any result. He seems to have escaped scot-free; and indeed there was no lack of men as corrupt as he in the House of Commons and in all places of trust. William then took the extraordinary step of asking the House to appoint seven members to superintend the preparations for the next campaign; but this it very wisely declined to do. It appointed a Committee, however, to examine into the expenses of the war,[252] and finally passed a Mutiny Act with new clauses against false musters and other abuses--clauses which were as old as King Edward the Sixth, and for all practical purposes as dead. It was not legislation that was wanted, but enforcement of existing laws. William, however, appears early to have abandoned in despair the hope of finding an honest man in England. [Sidenote: 1690.]