Half the population of Ireland lived on potatoes, and by the beginning ...

Half the population of Ireland lived on potatoes, and by the beginning of October it was doubtful whether half the crop would be saved. England had been accustomed to take on an average 2,000,000 quarters of wheat from Ireland.

It looked as if she would have to send 2,000,000 quarters to keep the Irish alive, and the English harvest was short.

It was out of the question to ask the English to pay duty both on the maize they ate themselves, and on the maize they bought for the Irish: equally impossible to suppose that the Corn Laws, once suspended, could ever be reimposed, or that the Conservative party, as it stood, would ever consent to repeal them. Peel, with the support of the Whigs and with a fragment of his own party, undertook to admit foreign maize at a nominal fixed duty.' Supported by imminent famine, the arguments of the League could not be answered: they could only be opposed.

It seemed as if nature, which was solving the Irish problem in the sense of the economists by killing off the surplus population, would

solve an English problem in

the sense of the Radicals by killing off the superfluous landlords. In fact, it did no harm to the English gentry, and it made the Irish problem insoluble.

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