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The newspapers were fairly evenly divided in their expressed opinions. The Government had recently adjourned Parliament, after a session in which their majority had oscillated dangerously more than once, and the Opposition Press seized upon the Blight in order to embarrass the Cabinet, and especially the Prime Minister, as far as possible. They clamoured that the Government should take steps to secure the food supply of the country by making immediate purchases of wheat in the foreign markets. They demanded that a system of rationing should be established forthwith; and that cases of food-hoarding should be stringently punished. Day after day they held up to public obloquy the individual members of the Cabinet, who were then scattered on holiday; the amusements of each of them were described and coupled with sneering hopes that they would succeed better in their games than they had done in the government of the country and the safeguarding of the national interests. Echoes of the Mazanderan Development Syndicate scandal were kept alive in the most ingenious manner.