pended in
time, food could be carried to British ports in the ships of _any_
nation; and in fact, whilst a great outcry was raised by our Government
about the scarcity of food, and the want of ships to carry it, Odessa
and other food centres were crowded with vessels, _looking for freights
to England, but could not obtain them_, in consequence of the operation
of the navigation laws. The immediate effect was, a great difficulty in
sending food to those parts of Ireland where the people were dying of
sheer starvation. But a second effect was, the enrichment, to an
enormous extent, of the owners of the mercantile marine of England;
freights having nearly doubled in almost every instance, and in a most
important one, that of America, nearly trebled. The freights from London
to Irish ports had fully trebled.

The Prime Minister came down to Parliament at the end of January, 1847,
and proposed the suspension of the Navigation Laws until the first of
September following; in order, he said, that freights might be lowered
and food come in more abundantly; but, as one of the members said in the
debate that followed, the proposal, good in itself, came too late, being
made at a time when the surplus of the harvest of 1846 was to a great
extent, disposed of. In his speech proposing the suspension of the
Navigation Laws, Lord John Russell used, of course, in its favour the
arguments which everybody was tired pressing upon himself for months
before; but he especially dwelt upon the great increase of freights. The
ordinary freight from the Danube, said his lordship, used to be 10s. the
quarter; it is now 16s. 6d. to 17s.; from Odessa, 8s.; it is 13s. to
13s. 6d. at present: from the United States, 5s.; it is now 12s. 6d. to
13s.; and what concerns Ireland still more, he said, the usual freight
from London to Cork was 1s. to 1s. 3d. the quarter, and often
considerably less; it is now 3s. to 3s. 6d. the quarter, with much
difficulty in finding vessels even at those freights.

Lord John and his representatives in Ireland were exceedingly fond of
propounding free trade principles to those who complained that the Irish
harvest--the natural food of the Irish people--was being taken out of
the country. O'Connell, early in the Famine, said: close your ports
against the exportation of your corn--open them to the corn markets of
the world. This and the like advice was ridiculed as "Protection," and
"Ignorance," by those ostentatious apostles o