of Flour, Beef, and Pork, with all the golden opportunities for personal profits which were thus afforded, were concentrated in his own hands ; that there were, consequently, rival purchasing Agent-, by whom and by the shrewd farmers, the prices of those articles were so greatly advanced that the Committee of Safety was constrained to interfere ; and that, after the various buyers, on the account of the Congress, had thus secured their several harvests of the official plunder, the authority was suspended, the Magazine, very soon after, being declared unnecessary ; 1 and the provisions which had been bought, at high prices, were thrown on the market again, for such prices as, under such circumstances, could be obtained for them, from the Contractors and Commissaries of the Continental Army. 2 Under the Rules of the Provincial Congress, the accounts and the vouchers had to be audited, before the former could be closed ; and Colonel Gilbert Drake, who had endeavored to supersede his associates, in making the necessary purchases, could not produce a sufficient amount of those vouchers to balance his accounts -- he had received three thousand pounds, in money ; fifty pounds of that sum he could not account for; he was mean enough to hesitate, when the missing fifty pounds were officially called for, preferring, rather to go down to posterity, through all time, as a defaulter; 8 and the matter was laid before the Congress, to be patched up, in some way which would spare him from paying the one hundred and twenty-five dollars, which had disappeared, he did not know how.