ther."[80]

Some days later the Lord Lieutenant announced to the Premier that
Professors Lindley and Playfair had arrived in Dublin, and also gave a
set of queries which he had placed in their hands--all very useful, but
one of special importance--"What means can be adopted for securing seed
potatoes for next year?" This communication contained the following
passage:--"There is a great cry for the prohibition of exportation,
particularly of oats. With regard to potatoes, it seems to be pretty
generally admitted that to prohibit the exportation of so perishable a
produce would be a very doubtful advantage. Towards the end of next week
we shall know, I presume, the result of the deliberations of her
Majesty's Government; and as by that time the digging will be
sufficiently advanced to enable us to guess at the probable result of
the harvest, I shall then intimate to the several Lieutenants the
propriety of calling county meetings, unless I should hear from you that
you disapprove of such proceedings. The danger of such meetings is in
the remedies they may suggest, and the various subjects they may embrace
in their discussions, wholly foreign to the question before them."[81]
Three days later (Oct. 27) he again writes to the Premier: "Everything
is rising rapidly in price, and the people begin to show symptoms of
discontent which may ripen into something worse. Should I be authorized
in issuing a proclamation prohibiting distillation from grain? This is
demanded on all sides." There is no reply to this letter given by Sir
Robert Peel in his Memoirs, and yet he must have written one. He
certainly wrote to the Lord Lieutenant between the 3rd and the 8th of
November; for the Mansion House deputation was received at the Viceregal
Lodge on the 3rd, and we find the Viceroy in a letter to the Premier on
the 8th explaining what he had said to the deputation on the 3rd; so
that the Premier must, in the meantime, have put him on his defence; "it
is perfectly true," writes Lord Heytesbury, "that I did, in my answer to
the Lord Mayor, say there was no immediate pressure in the market; but
you must not give too wide a meaning to that observation, which had
reference merely to his demand that the exportation of grain should be
prohibited and the ports immediately thrown open." But neither this
passage, nor anything in the subsequent part of the letter, sufficiently
explains what he had written eleven days before, namely, that everything