For what is it which has occasioned such a chasm in the freeholders at this time, and rendered it necessary, on the admission of Ministers themselves, to lower the suffrage to an £8 _interest_, if we would marshal anything like a competent number of freeholders round the Reform banners? It is in vain to refer to the famine of 1846. That famine occurred three years ago: it was bountifully relieved by the British Government; and since its termination we have had two fine harvests, those of 1847 and 1849, for each of which a public thanksgiving was returned. A bad harvest does not destroy some hundred thousand electors. If it does, there are heirs who succeed in ordinary circumstances to the freeholds, and form as respectable an army of electors as their fathers had done. What has become of all the heirs of the starved electors, if they were really starved? What has become of the freeholds which they formerly held? The answer is obvious, and has been now officially returned by Government, and made the foundation of a great constitutional change. THEY HAVE BEEN DESTROYED BY THE FREE TRADE MEASURES. The Reform Bill, in its ultimate effects, has crushed the brood whom it warmed into life. Above 200,000 holders of land, in Ireland, have disappeared since 1845. It is now admitted that they were, for the most part, the highest class of cultivators; for the extension of the suffrage is justified on the fearful diminution of their numbers. So rapid has been their destruction, so fearful the process of deterioration they have undergone, that out of above 500,000 holders of land who are still in Ireland, only 72,000 could be found qualified under the Reform Act; and, to augment the number of these, it is necessary to lower the franchise to £8. Eight pounds a-year is little more than the average maintenance of a pauper in England. But such is the misery which Free Trade measures have spread in Ireland, that it is there the standard of a freehold qualification.