, has turned out a gross
delusion. Every misrepresentation on this head was met by overwhelming
facts; and the consequence is, that the Premier did not venture, in his
first speech, to found upon a scarcity as a reason for proposing his
measure. Something, indeed, was said about the possibility of a pressure
occurring before the arrival of the next harvest--it was perhaps
necessary to say so; but no man who has studied the agricultural
statistics of last harvest, can give the slightest weight to that
assertion. His second speech has just been put into our hands. Here
certainly he is more explicit. With deep gravity, and a tone of the
greatest deliberation, he tells the House of Commons, that before the
month of May shall arrive, the pressure will be upon us. We read that
announcement, so confidently uttered, with no slight amount of misgiving
as to the opinions we have already chronicled, but the next half column
put us right. There is, after all, no considerable deficiency in the
grain crop. It may be that the country has raised that amount of corn
which is necessary for its ordinary consumption, but the potato crop in
Ireland has failed! This, then--the failure of the potato crop in
Ireland--is the immediate cause, the necessity, of abolishing the
protections to agriculture in Great Britain! Was there ever such logic?
What has the murrain in potatoes to do with the question of foreign
competition, as applied to English, Scottish, nay, Irish corn? We are
old enough to recollect something like a famine in the Highlands, when
the poor were driven to such shifts as humanity shudders to recall; but
we never heard that distress attributed to the fact of English
protection. If millions of the Irish will not work, and will not grow
corn--if they prefer trusting to the potato, and the potato happens to
fail--are _we_ to be punished for that defect, be it one of
carelessness, of improvidence, or of misgovernment? Better that we had
no reason at all than one so obviously flimsy. If we turn to the
petitions which, about the end of autumn, were forwarded from different
towns, praying for that favourite measure of the League, the opening of
the ports, it will be seen that one and all of them were founded on the
assumed fact, that the grain crop was a deficient one. That has proved
to be fallacy, and is of course no longer tenable; but now we are asked
to take, as a supplementary argument, the state of the potatoes in
Ireland, and to