In other and greater matters a like topic recurs. When the controversy against the Corn Laws was at its height, the advocates of repeal were taunted with wishing to explode native wheat. They replied, "Wheat is now largely sown in England where the climate or soil is unfavourable; in such fields only, the culture will be discouraged; where it can be produced and ripened with greater certainty it will still be grown, and the price will no longer be forced up; the lands less suited to wheat may well yield, either some other grain in rotation, or other needful crop." Valid as this reply seemed, grand and glorious as are the results of opening our ports to foreign corn, the retrospect of thirty years nevertheless suggests new lines of thought. Want of food in Ireland when the potato crop failed was the argument which converted Sir Robert Peel; but the desire of selling cotton and woollen fabrics, or hardware, to those whose "chief coin" was wheat, gave an earlier impetus to the Anti-Corn Law League. Cobden and his associates were in the right, and performed well the task of the day; but the existing state of our agriculture is now discerned to be highly unsatisfactory. Every year widens and deepens the conviction that our laws of Land Tenure are fundamentally wrong; indeed, they are diverse from those of all the world; if they are not signally better than those of all other nations, they are gravely and lamentably worse; and the idea now presents itself, that the temporary relief given to us by the free importation of wheat has proved a buttress to an evil system of land laws, and has blinded us to the essential evils contingent on a perpetual increasing ratio of the population in great towns to that of the rustic districts. Much wealthier, no doubt, we are, and our poorer classes are less hard-worked. To dwell on the drawbacks through higher expectations, artificial wants, higher prices of coal, bricks, and houses--not to mention worse matters--might lead into too long digression. But, to bring out the idea here pointed at, we may speculate as to the results which must have followed, if no foreign markets had been able to give us permanent supplies of necessary food. Suppose that barely we had been able in 1847 to save from starvation as many poor Irishmen as we did save, but that in succeeding years the United Kingdom had been cast on its own resources for grain and cattle; will any one maintain that by a proper use of the land we could not have fed our own population?