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the very liberal aid now being rendered by the General Government through your Department, and the various contributions made by individual charities, with all that can be done through the State's crippled finances, the supplies are now entirely inadequate to the real destitution, and actual want of food.

I cannot consistently ask you to supply the entire deficiency; were I to do so and you grant the request, it would be a draft upon the liberality of the Government apparently unreasonable. Yet we can't very well circumscribe the bounds of starving necessity for bread on which to maintain life.

Without entering into the causes which have produced this frightful and heart-rending amount of destitution, hunger, and in some cases, of starvation in Alabama, I have no hesitation in saying there are not less than one hundred thousand widows, orphans, old men and women, and men disabled by the late war who are to-day real objects