"There must also be taken into account the dire domestic privations endured for the last three years of famine, the general flight of tenants with the landlords' rent, the desertion of the land, impoverished to the last degree by the runaways, yet for whose dishonesty and abuse of solemn contract the unfortunate proprietor is held responsible--the abandoned farms being still subject to accumulation of poor-rate and taxes. Then come the distraint, the impounding, the sale and sacrifice of property; while the home market, _swamped by free trade with foreigners_, has left landlord and farmer no help or resource whatever to bear up against the intolerable oppression of financial burdens, sanctioned by law, under the free constitution of Great Britain! One case of grievous suffering by a respectable family in this county was communicated to the preparatory meeting on Saturday last, by one of the gentlemen present. The possessor of a rent-roll of £1500 a-year landed estate, which netted £1200 _annually four years ago, was absolutely compelled to subsist with his wife and seven children for three months of the past twelve, without the ordinary comfort of a meat dinner_; a cup of weak tea or coffee, and the vegetables of the kitchen-garden, commonly furnishing the table of this most wretched household! Incredible and appalling as this may appear, we have been assured it is not a solitary instance of the excessive want and privation known to exist."--_Times_, Nov. 4, 1849. So much for the working of free trade and a restricted currency in the Emerald Isle. One would suppose, in reading these melancholy accounts, we were not dealing with any people in modern times, but transported back to those dismal periods, after the fall of the Roman empire, when the contemporary annalists contemplated the extinction of the human race, from the desolation of some of its provinces. This dreadful state of things in Ireland is but a repetition of what, under the operation of these causes, aided by the fatal step of unqualified emancipation, has for some years been going on in the West Indies. We have not room to enlarge on this prolific subject, teeming as it does with facts illustrative of the effects of the free-trade system. They are generally known. Suffice it to say, the _West Indies are totally ruined_. British colonies, on which £120,000,000 sterling has been expended, and which fifteen years ago produced £22,000,000 worth of agricultural produce annually, have been irrecoverably destroyed. The fee-simple of all the estates they contain would not sell for £5,000,000 sterling. We know an estate in the West Indies, which formerly used to net £1500 a-year, and to which £7000 worth of the best new machinery was sent within the last five years, which the proprietor would be too happy to sell, machinery and all, for £5000.