a cabinet is to keep on good terms with "the agitator and hireling speech-maker,"--and that he is the wisest minister who is most adroit in timing his concessions, and casting off his principles at the moment they become inconvenient. Any seeming tranquillity, any truce with the enemies of constitutional order purchased by such a policy, can never be otherwise than temporary and precarious, because, it is insincere--insincere on both sides--a hollow compromise between principle and the expediency of the hour. When we look to the reasons Mr Laing gives for the opinion we have been commenting on, they will be found to hang together rather loosely. They pre-suppose that agitation _de rebus frumentariis_, and specially the agitation of the League, could only proceed from the pressure of want. Now, the very week that the Bill passed, the price of wheat was 52s. 2d.--which, curiously enough, is the exact sum fixed on by Mr Wilson as the natural price of wheat in England. At that time beef was selling in London at 7s. 3d. a stone. The corn averages for the whole previous year were a fraction over 49s. 6d. The average of the _ten_ previous years was 56s. 6d., which, by another strange coincidence, corresponds to a sixpence with the price admitted by Sir Robert Peel. With such rates of the chief articles of subsistence, how can it be said that scarcity was the cause of the Corn-Law agitation? The idea of famishing millions imploring bread may have been an appropriate figure of speech in the rabid cantations of an Ebenezer Elliot; but who seriously believes that the cry of "abolition" was the voice of a starving people, and not the mere watchword of a faction? Scarcity was only the pretext for the clamour before which the Government yielded; and is there any one weak or sanguine enough to believe that, by removing that pretext, and yielding to that clamour, we have silenced the voice of discontent, and ruined the trade of the demagogue? Is agrarian agitation no longer possible? Can we shut our eyes to what is even now passing in the north of Ireland? The fire which we are told was finally extinguished in 1846, has reappeared in that quarter, and already the sparks from it are kindling up in other parts of the empire. The demand for what is called "fixity of tenure" is but the germ of a new agitation, the future phases of which, unless it shall be met in a very different spirit from that which has characterised our recent policy, it is not difficult to foresee. It will become the new rallying point of disaffection--the centre of inflammatory action. The old machinery of the League will be set up anew, and the passions of the people will again be excited by a course of studious and systematic irritation. Ministers will hesitate, deprecate, and dally with the difficulty; rival statesmen will by turns fan the flame, or feebly resist it, as suits the party tactics of the day; until, at length, some one