The Free Traders went on debating and dividing in the House, agitating and lecturing all over the country, for some years without any marked Parliamentary success following their endeavors. An immense and overwhelming majority always voted against them in the House of Commons. They were making progress, and very great progress, but it was not that kind of advance which had yet come to be decided by a Parliamentary vote. Probably a keen and experienced eye might have noted clearly enough the progress they were making. The Whig party were coming more and more round to the principles of free trade. Day after day some Whig leader was admitting that the theories of the past would not do for the present, and, as we have said, the Tory leader had himself gone so far as to admit the justice of the general principles of free trade. At one point the main difference between Sir Robert Peel, the leader of the House of Commons, and Lord John Russell, the leader of the opposition, seems to have been nothing more than this, that Peel still regarded grain as a necessary exception to the principle of free trade, and Lord John Russell was not clear that the time had come when it could be treated otherwise than as an exception. An event, however, over which no parties and no leaders had any control, suddenly intervened to hasten the action and spur the convictions of the leaders on both sides, and especially of the Prime Minister. This was the great famine which broke out in Ireland in the autumn of 1845. The vast majority of the Irish people had long depended for their food on the potato alone. The summer of 1845 had been a long season of wet and cold and sunlessness. In the autumn the news went abroad that the whole potato crop of Ireland was in danger of destruction, if not already actually destroyed. Before attention had well been awakened to the crisis, it was officially announced that more than one-third of the entire potato crop had been swept away by the disease, and that it had not ceased its ravages, but, on the contrary, was spreading more and more every day.