This view of the subject is of such vast importance that we deem it impossible to impress it too strongly on our readers. We have been always told that the great thing is to secure a great importation; that such a thing must necessarily lead to a corresponding increase of exportation;--that all apprehension about the imports being paid in gold, and not in manufactures, are chimerical;--that the sooner the inferior lands in the British islands go out of cultivation the better;--that ample food for the inhabitants will be obtained from foreign states; and that the agriculturists thrown out of employment by the change will be rapidly absorbed, and more profitably employed in sustaining our extended manufactures. Well, the thing has been done, and the desired consummation has taken place, from an extraneous cause, even more rapidly than was anticipated. The Free-Traders contemplated the substitution of foreign for British agricultural produce to the extent of fifteen or twenty millions as a most desirable result; but they only lamented it could not be looked for for three or four years. It would take that time to beat down the British farmer; to convince the cultivators of inferior lands of the folly of attempting a competition with the great grain districts of the Continent. Providence has done the thing at once. We have got on at railway speed to the blessings of the new system. Free-trade was to lead to the much-desired substitution of six million quarters of home for six million quarters of foreign grain in three years. But the potato-rot has done it in one. The free-trade rot could not have done it nearly so expeditiously, but it would have done it as effectually. It is a total mistake, therefore, to represent the famine in Ireland and the West of Scotland, as an external calamity which has concealed the natural effects of free-trade. It has only brought them to light at once.