"The quantity of grain imported in seven months only, viz. from 5th July 1846, to 5th February 1847, exceeded six millions of quarters, at the very time when our exports were diminishing. It may be imagined how prodigious must have been the drain upon the metallic resources of the country to make up the balance. The potato rot, it is said, has _concealed_ the effects of free trade. Quite the reverse. 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 millions of quarters of foreign, for six millions of quarters of home growth in three years_. But the potato rot has done it _in one_. The free trade policy could not have done it 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 effects of free trade. _It has only brought them to light at once._"--LESSONS FROM THE FAMINE. _Blackwood's Magazine_, March 1847. The real amount of the famine in Ireland, of which so much has been said, was very much magnified, however, by the fears of some parties and the interested exaggerations of others. The deficiency in the two islands has been stated variously, at from sixteen to twenty million pounds worth. Take it at the larger sum to avoid all idea of misrepresentation--what is this to the total agricultural produce of Great Britain and Ireland? That is estimated by Mr Porter on very rational grounds at three hundred millions annually, in produce of all kinds. The subtraction of twenty millions worth;--_a fifteenth part_, at the very utmost, could never account for the prodigious rise of prices from forty-nine shillings a-quarter to one hundred and ten shillings, which wheat rose to in March 1847. It was the impulse given to speculation in grain, by the sudden throwing open of the ports by Sir Robert Peel's free trade measures, which really occasioned the prodigious importation so much exceeding what was required, which actually took place. The defalcation occasioned by the Irish potato rot, and the deficiency of the oat-crop in Great Britain, was at the very utmost a fifteenth part of the annual supply. But the grain imported in the first nine months of this year has exceeded ten millions of quarters, being a full _sixth_ part of the annual consumption of the nation, which for the use of man and animals together is estimated at sixty million quarters. And hence the rapid fall of prices which followed the fine harvest of 1847, from one hundred shillings to fifty shillings, which has involved in ruin so many houses concerned in the corn trade.