A single instance may be given of what happened. A
contractor called Meyer bought oats from the Sales Depart- ment and resold them to the Army, making a profit of £1 on every three hundred pounds, or a gross daily profit upon oats alone of over £2,000. The Committee think that culpable negligence is not the explanation, but that somewhere or other there was grave misdoing. They consider that Colonel Morgan was responsible "for having produced and foreseen the situation which was subsequently reached, and which was already in sight when he quitted South Africa," and they add that his successor, Colonel Hipwell, was unfit for his position and a sharer in the culpability. Though, as we have said, the Report is an ex-parte statement, since the evidence has not been legally reviewed, yet it must cause profound uneasiness among the people of Britain, and must be followed at once by a most searching inquiry. We may add that we could have wished that a Report which deals with such painful matters had been written in a style which resembled less the rhetoric of the platform and the extravagance of a sensational novel.
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