of getting the use of a little scrap of land for himself, on which to grow potatoes to be the sole food of himself and his family. The news came, in the autumn of 1845, that the long continuance of sunless wet and cold had imperilled, if not already destroyed, the food of a people.

The cabinet of Sir Robert Peel held hasty meetings closely following each other. People began to ask whether Parliament was about to be called together, and whether the Government had resolved on a bold policy. The Anti-Corn-law League were clamoring for the opening of the ports. The Prime-minister himself was strongly in favor of such a course. He urged upon his colleagues that all restrictions upon the importation of foreign corn should be suspended either by an Order in Council, or by calling Parliament together and recommending such a measure from the throne. It is now known that in offering this advice to his colleagues Peel accompanied it with the expression of a doubt as to whether it would ever be possible to restore the restrictions that had once been suspended. Indeed, this doubt must have filled every mind. The League were openly declaring that one reason why they called for the opening of the ports was that, once opened, they never could be closed again. The doubt was enough for some of the colleagues of Sir Robert Peel. It seems marvellous now how responsible statesmen could struggle for the retention of restrictions which were so unpopular and indefensible that if they were once suspended, under the pressure of no matter what exceptional necessity, they never could be reimposed. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Stanley, however, opposed the idea of opening the ports, and the proposal fell through. The Cabinet merely resolved on appointing a commission, consisting of the heads of departments in Ireland, to take some steps to guard against a sudden outbreak of famine, and the thought of an autumnal session was abandoned.

Sir Robert Peel himself has thus tersely described the manner in which his proposals were received: "The cabinet by a very considerable majority declined giving its assent to the proposals which I thus made to them. They were supported by only three members of the cabinet -the Earl of Aberdeen, Sir James Graham, and Mr. Sidney Herbert. The other members of the cabinet, some on the ground of objection to the principle of the measures recommended, others upon the ground that there was not yet sufficient evidence of the necessity for them, withheld their sanction."

The great cry all through Ireland was for the opening of the ports. The Mansion House Relief Committee of Dublin issued a series of resolutions declaring their conviction, from the most undeniable evidence, that considerably more than one-third of the entire potato crop in Ireland had been already destroyed by the disease, and that the disease had not ceased its ravages, but on the contrary was daily expanding more and more. "No reasonable conjecture can be formed," the resolutions went on to state, "with respect to the limit of its effects short of the destruction of the entire remaining crop ;" and the document concluded with a denunciation of the ministry for not opening the ports or calling Parliament together before the usual time for its assembling.

It

Two or three days after the issue of these resolutions Lord John Russell wrote a letter from Edinburgh to his constituents, the electors of the City of London-a letter which is one of the historical documents of the reign. announced his unqualified conversion to the principles of the Anti-Corn-law League. The failure of the potato crop was, of course, the immediate occasion of this letter. "Indecision and procrastination," Lord John Russell wrote, "may produce a state of suffering which it is frightful to contemplate. . . . . . . . It is no longer worth while to con

....

tend for a fixed duty. In 1841 the Free-trade party would have agreed to a duty of 88. per quarter on wheat, and after a lapse of years this duty might have been further reduced, and ultimately abolished. But the imposition of any duty at present, without a provision for its extinction within a short period, would but prolong a contest already sufficiently fruitful of animosity and discontent." Lord John Russell then invited a general understanding, to put an end to a system " which has been proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter division among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality, and crime among the people." Then the writer added a significant remark to the effect that the Government appeared to be waiting for some excuse to give up the present Corn-law, and urging the people to afford them all the excuse they could desire, "by petition, by address, by remonstrance."

Peel himself has told us in his Memoirs what was the effect which this letter produced upon his own councils. It" could not," he points out, "fail to exercise a very material influence on the public mind, and on the subjectmatter of our deliberations in the cabinet. It justified the conclusion that the Whig party was prepared to unite with the Anti-Corn-law League in demanding the total repeal of the Corn-laws." Peel would not consent now to propose simply an opening of the ports. It would seem, he thought, a mere submission, to accept the minimum of the terms ordered by the Whig leader. That would have been well enough when he first recommended it to his cabinet; and if it could then have been offered to the country as the spontaneous movement of a united ministry, it would have been becoming of the emergency and of the men. But to do this now would be futile; would seem like trifling with the question. Sir Robert Peel, therefore, recommended to his cabinet an early meeting of Parlia

ment with the view of bringing forward some measure equivalent to a speedy repeal of the Corn-laws.

The recommendation was wise: it was, indeed, indispensable. Yet it is hard to think that an impartial posterity will form a very lofty estimate of the wisdom with which the counsels of the two great English parties were guided in this momentous emergency. Neither Whigs nor Tories appear to have formed a judgment because of facts or principles, but only in deference to the political necessities of the hour. Sir Robert Peel himself denied that it was the resistless hand of famine in Ireland which had brought him to his resolve that the Corn-laws ought to be abolished. He grew into the conviction that they were bad in principle. Lord John Russell had long been growing into the same conviction. Yet the League had been left to divide with but small numbers against overwhelming majorities made up of both parties, until the very session before Peel proposed to repeal the Corn-laws. Lord Beaconsfield, indeed, indulges in something like exaggeration when he says, in his "Life of Lord George Bentinck," that the close of the session of 1845 found the League nearly reduced to silence. But it is not untrue that, as he says, "the Manchester confederates seemed to be least in favor with Parliament and the country on the very eve of their triumph." "They lost at the same time elections and the ear of the House; and the cause of total and immediate repeal seemed in a not less hopeless position than when, under circumstances of infinite difficulty, it was first and solely upheld by the terse eloquence and vivid perception of Charles Villiers." Lord Beaconsfield certainly ought to know what cause had and what had not the ear of the House of Commons at that time; and yet we venture to doubt, even after his assurance, whether the League and its speakers had in any way found their hold on the attention of Parliament diminishing. But the loss of elections is beyond dispute.