the famine in Ireland and the West of Scotland, as an external calamity
which has concealed the natural effects of free-trade. It has only
brought them to light at once.

Had British agriculture, instead of being stricken with sterility by the
hand of Providence, in the poorest and worst cultivated part of the two
islands, been suffered gradually to waste away, under the effects of a
great and increasing foreign importation in all parts of the empire, the
destruction of home produce would have been equally extensive, but it
would have been more general. It would have risen to as great an amount,
but it would not have been so painfully concentrated in particular
districts. Hundreds would not have been dying of famine in Skibbereen;
seed-corn would not have been awanting in Skye and Mull; cultivation
would not have been abandoned in Tipperary; but the cessation of
agricultural produce over the whole empire would have been quite as
great. Low prices would have done the business as effectually, though
not quite so speedily, as the pestilence which has smitten the
potato-field. Whoever casts his eye on the table of prices given
below[11] for twenty years in London and Dantzic, must at once see
that, under a free-trade system, as large an importation of foreign
produce, and as extensive a contraction of home, as has taken place this
year is to be permanently looked for. The exportation and return of the
precious metals, and contraction of credit now felt as so distressing,
may be expected to be permanent. Providence has given us a warning of
the effects of our policy, before they have become irreparable. We have
only to suppose the present state of commerce and manufactures lasting,
and we have a clear vision of the blessings of free-trade.

Nor is there any difficulty in understanding how it happens that the
substitution of a large portion of foreign, for an equal amount of
home-grown produce, occasions such disastrous effects, and in particular
proves so injurious to the commercial classes, who in the first instance
generally suppose they are to be benefited by the change. If two or
three millions of rural labourers in the poorest and worst cultivated
districts of the island, are thrown out of employment, either by a
failure in the vegetable on which alone, in their rude state, they can
employ their labour, or by the gradual substitution of foreign for home
produce in the supply of food for the people, it is a poor compens