ABSTRACT
Cranborne’s memo marks the beginning of the government’s investigation of the Board of Revenue and Beadon’s response to the famine, noting that, for example, there had been a ‘deplorable loss of life’ caused by ‘want of food’. The scanty information, principally derived from telegrams, furnished in previous Despatch of the 16th June, received at this office on the 20th July, had afforded Her Majesty’s Government but too much reason to believe that the people in large portions of Bengal and Orissa were exposed to great privations from the deficiency of food, if not to the horrors of actual famine. That the rules and principles of economical science should not be lightly interfered with, and that the supply and the distribution throughout the country of the means of subsistence should, except under extraordinary circumstances, be left to the operation of the law of ‘demand and supply,’ there can be no question at all.
