was in all essentials what it had been during the closing years of the eighteenth century when (as Arthur O'Connor pointed out) Ireland was supplying the belligerents of Europe with food and leaving her own population to starve, while the traders waxed wealthy. The only difference was that, the inducement then being a bounty paid by Parliament on exported corn, the inducement now was a bounty paid by the purchaser in England in the form of an enhanced price. It was a situation which, as the Labour Party was quick to point out, could not be met by any unofficial organization however energetic, such as the Sinn Fein Food Committee, but required official action. The Labour Party demanded that the Irish Food Control Committee should be strengthened and vested with executive powers, no longer remaining subordinate to the London Controller: until this was done, private or unofficial advice or action was merely playing with the question. Whether Sinn Fein exerted, any but a slight influence on the export of food may be doubted; but it certainly managed the other part of its task--the distribution of the available supplies--with a certain skill. Measures were concerted for purchasing supplies in counties where food was relatively abundant and sending it to agents in districts where it was scarce. The usual abuses which attend attempts to supply food to a poor population could not, of course, be entirely eliminated, but on the whole the experiment seems to have been generally successful. In Ennis, for instance, the local Sinn Fein Club established a Sinn Fein market to which farmers brought their potatoes: the club purchased them at the current price and distributed them to 150 poor families at cost: each family was provided with a card endorsed with the quantity of potatoes necessary for its needs and on presentation of the card received the potatoes. The scheme was financed by some prominent men in Ennis who advanced the necessary capital, the Sinn Fein Club being at the cost of the working expenses of the scheme: there was "no credit and no charity." Although this and similar schemes worked fairly well, and undoubtedly relieved the situation appreciably in many districts, they were open to the objection brought by the Labour Party that they were ineffective as compared both with genuine co-operative effort on the part of the people themselves and with official action taken by the County Councils or municipal authorities. They were, besides, likely to give rise to the question which _Irish Opinion_ (the Irish Labour weekly) put "Is the object political or economic?" There is no doubt that the fact that Sinn Fein was actively promoting measures of relief, while official action tended to produce a situation approaching to famine, was used as an argument in favour of the Sinn Fein policy in general. It was hardly to be expected either that Sinn Feiners should not use the argument or that the public should not think that there was something in it.