Things, however, are now changed. Protection to domestic industry, at least in agriculture, is at an end; prices are down to forty shillings the quarter for wheat, and half that sum for oats and barley; the prices of sheep and cattle have fallen enormously to the home-grower, though that of meat is far from having declined in the same proportion; and, as all this has taken place during a season of prices low beyond example, it is evident that it may be expected to be still greater when we again experience the usual vicissitudes of bad harvests in our variable climate. The returns prove that ever since the duties on foreign grain became nominal, in the beginning of February last, the importation of corn and flour into Great Britain and Ireland has gone on steadily at the rate of 1,200,000 quarters a-month; and that now seven-eighths of the supply of the metropolis, and of all our other great towns, comes from foreign parts.[28] How British agriculture is to go on staggering under such a frightful load of foreign importation into its best markets, it is not difficult to foresee. Every scholar knows how Italian agriculture decayed, under a similar importation of grain from the distant provinces of the Roman empire; and how directly the fall of the empire was owing to that fatal change. [28] Take as an example the importation into London, from 24th to 29th September 1849: prices being--wheat, 41s. 9d.; barley. 27s.; oats, 17s. 10d. FOREIGN. BRITISH. Qrs. Qrs. Wheat 18,023 All kinds of Barley, 8,319 grain. Oats, 23,408 Beans, 2,620 7,129 ------- 52,375 --_Week from Oct. 29 to Nov. 3._ Putting aside all minor considerations, which crowd upon the mind in considering the probable effects of this prodigious change, there are three of paramount importance which force themselves on the attention, any one of which holds the fate of the empire suspended in a doubtful balance.