rth fifteen millions sterling. The home
agricultural produce that has failed is just equal in value to the
foreign agricultural produce that has been imported. The distress that
prevails, therefore, is not owing to any deficiency of food for man or
animals in the United Kingdom, for as much has come in, of foreign
produce, as has disappeared of domestic. It is entirely to be ascribed
to the supplanting, _in the national subsistence, of a large part of
home produce by an equally large part of foreign produce_. And in the
social, commercial, and national effects which we see around us, we may
discern, as in a mirror, not merely the probable but certain effects of
such a substitution if perpetuated to future times.

This view of the subject is of such vast importance that we deem it
impossible to impress it too strongly on our readers. We have been
always told that the great thing is to secure a great importation; that
such a thing must necessarily lead to a corresponding increase of
exportation;--that all apprehension about the imports being paid in
gold, and not in manufactures, are chimerical;--that the sooner the
inferior lands in the British islands go out of cultivation the
better;--that ample food for the inhabitants will be obtained from
foreign states; and that the agriculturists thrown out of employment by
the change will be rapidly absorbed, and more profitably employed in
sustaining our extended manufactures. Well, the thing has been done,
and the desired consummation has taken place, from an extraneous cause,
even more rapidly than was anticipated. The Free-Traders contemplated
the substitution of foreign for British agricultural produce to the
extent of fifteen or twenty millions as a most desirable result; but
they only lamented it could not be looked for for three or four years.
It would take that time to beat down the British farmer; to convince the
cultivators of inferior lands of the folly of attempting a competition
with the great grain districts of the Continent. Providence has done the
thing at once. We have got on at railway speed to the blessings of the
new system. Free-trade was to lead to the much-desired substitution of
six million quarters of home for six million quarters of foreign grain
in three years. But the potato-rot has done it in one. The free-trade
rot could not have done it nearly so expeditiously, but it would have
done it as effectually. It is a total mistake, therefore, to represent