Anxious to explain, at the very earliest moment, the causes which led to the dissolution of his Ministry and their return to office, he spoke upon the Address, and went into the whole question. He put the potato blight in the foreground; for, with the instinct of the caddice worm, he felt that this was the piece of bulrush by which he could best float his Free Trade policy, his Government and himself. And, indeed, from the first night of the session until the resolutions on the Corn Laws were carried, the members of the Government showed the greatest anxiety to keep the terrible consequences of the potato failure before Parliament. They did not exaggerate the failure, nor its then probable effects; they gave to both that importance which they really demanded, but which, only the admission helped the repeal of the Corn Laws, they would hardly be so ready to concede. The Protectionists, on the contrary, took up the cry of "exaggeration," against the most undoubted evidence, supplied from every part of the country, by persons in every rank of life, and of every shade of political opinion. "We have," said one of them,[88] "famine in the newspapers, we have famine in the speeches of Cabinet Ministers, but we find abundance in the markets; the cry of famine is a pretext, but it is not the reason for the changes." There is some truth in the latter part of this sentence--famine was not all a pretext, but it was certainly used by ministers as a cry to strengthen their Corn Law policy. "It was," said Sir Robert Peel, "that great and mysterious calamity, the potato failure, that was the immediate and proximate cause which led to the dissolution of the Government on the 6th of December, 1845." Two most important points, he said, they had now before them; (1) the measures to be immediately adopted in consequence of the potato blight; (2) and the ultimate course to be pursued in relation to the importation of grain. His opinions, he goes on to say, on the subject of Protection had undergone a change, and chiefly because the prophecies of the protectionists, when the tariff was altered in '42, were falsified by experience. Now, if the Free Traders had a watchword which they used more frequently than any other, it was the cry of "cheap bread;" and yet in the face of this, the Premier said:--"I want, at the same time, to show that concurrently with the increase of importation, there has been an increase in the prices of the articles." He then quotes several of the Government contracts to prove this assertion, which was quite correct.[89] Once again, he puts prominently forward the advice he gave his Government in the beginning of November, 1845, which was, either to open the ports by an Order in Council, or to call Parliament together as soon as possible, to meet the "great and pressing danger of the potato failure;" but what he does _not_ put forward is, that he grounded both these proposals on the condition that the Corn Laws should be repealed.