Science Quote by Joseph Hume

A “famine price” isn’t just expensive; it’s a political alarm bell. Hume’s phrasing treats price not as a clean market signal but as a muddy instrument that, under scarcity, stops telling the truth. “Vague” is the loaded word: in a famine, prices spike unevenly, speculation distorts supply, and the poor feel the increase first and hardest. The number on the tag becomes a blur of panic, hoarding, transport bottlenecks, and rumor. By calling it vague, Hume is quietly undermining the comforting idea that letting prices rise will efficiently ration food.

Then he turns the knife with “the plan.” He’s not debating hunger in the abstract; he’s critiquing a policy scheme - likely one that relies on price mechanisms or improvised relief - as theoretically neat and practically disastrous. The clause “subject to all the inconvenience now experienced” is a deft piece of parliamentary understatement. “Inconvenience” here is doing scandalous work: it compresses starvation, unrest, and administrative chaos into a polite term, the way 19th-century reformers often smuggled moral outrage through bureaucratic language.

Context matters: Hume was a radical Whig and fiscal reformer, famous for interrogating government waste and pushing for accountability. Read in that light, the sentence is a pressure point in a larger argument for policy that’s measurable, predictable, and administratively legible. He’s insisting that crisis economics doesn’t produce clarity; it produces noise - and that any “plan” built on that noise merely recreates the same suffering with a new rationale.