maintain and raise the price of wheat. There is,
first, a large call on the stock in hand for seed wheat; and,
secondly, the farmers are too busy to carry their corn into market,
and accordingly the market is ill supplied. A third cause is also in
operation to produce the same effect--that of an unreasonable alarm
always resulting from an ill-supplied market.

"It would seem astonishing and even incredible to men who argue only
theoretically, that though year after year the same uniform causes
operate, and produce exactly the same effects, yet that this aspect of
the market should continue to delude and mislead the public mind, but
so it is in the corn-market, and with the British public in general;
for though they see through a long succession of years that wheat and
flour invariably rise in the market immediately after harvest and
during seed-time, and though they ought to understand that this rise
is produced by the quantity required for seed, and by the busy
occupation of the farmers, they still perversely attribute it to
another cause, existing only in their own apprehensions, namely, that
the recent harvest has been deficient, and that the market is ill
supplied because there is an insufficient stock with which to supply
it.

"As it is the inflexible rule of our paper to apply itself on the
instant to correct all popular errors and to dissipate all
unreasonable panics, we feel ourselves called upon to say, that the
present rise in the price of corn results only from the very serious
failure of the potato crop in many of our own counties, and still more
materially in Belgium and other foreign kingdoms. From the mere
circumstance of their numbers only, to say nothing of their habits and
necessities, an immense quantity of this food is required for the
sustenance of many millions of the community; and when the crop fails
to such an extensive degree as it has done in the present case, this
vast numerical proportion of every state must necessarily be chiefly
maintained from the stock of corn. If the potato crop fail at home,
the poor are directly thrown upon the corn-market, and the price of
corn must necessarily rise in proportion to the increased demand.
Where the potato crop has failed abroad, the supply of foreign corn
must necessarily be directed to that quarter, and therefore less corn
will be imported into the British market.

"Now, it is the expectation of this result, which, together with the
wheat seed-t