e spoke
upon the Address, and went into the whole question. He put the potato
blight in the foreground; for, with the instinct of the caddice worm, he
felt that this was the piece of bulrush by which he could best float his
Free Trade policy, his Government and himself. And, indeed, from the
first night of the session until the resolutions on the Corn Laws were
carried, the members of the Government showed the greatest anxiety to
keep the terrible consequences of the potato failure before Parliament.
They did not exaggerate the failure, nor its then probable effects; they
gave to both that importance which they really demanded, but which, only
the admission helped the repeal of the Corn Laws, they would hardly be
so ready to concede. The Protectionists, on the contrary, took up the
cry of "exaggeration," against the most undoubted evidence, supplied
from every part of the country, by persons in every rank of life, and of
every shade of political opinion. "We have," said one of them,[88]
"famine in the newspapers, we have famine in the speeches of Cabinet
Ministers, but we find abundance in the markets; the cry of famine is a
pretext, but it is not the reason for the changes." There is some truth
in the latter part of this sentence--famine was not all a pretext, but
it was certainly used by ministers as a cry to strengthen their Corn Law
policy. "It was," said Sir Robert Peel, "that great and mysterious
calamity, the potato failure, that was the immediate and proximate cause
which led to the dissolution of the Government on the 6th of December,
1845." Two most important points, he said, they had now before them; (1)
the measures to be immediately adopted in consequence of the potato
blight; (2) and the ultimate course to be pursued in relation to the
importation of grain. His opinions, he goes on to say, on the subject of
Protection had undergone a change, and chiefly because the prophecies of
the protectionists, when the tariff was altered in '42, were falsified
by experience. Now, if the Free Traders had a watchword which they used
more frequently than any other, it was the cry of "cheap bread;" and yet
in the face of this, the Premier said:--"I want, at the same time, to
show that concurrently with the increase of importation, there has been
an increase in the prices of the articles." He then quotes several of
the Government contracts to prove this assertion, which was quite
correct.[89] Once again, he puts prominently