traffic, not only with slave States but with all free States that traded with them. It was curiously illogical to argue that by fettering trade we could free the slave. Hardly had Lord John Russell’s Government settled down in office when they were alarmed by the disturbed state of Ireland, where evictions and famine were goading the peasantry on to agrarian outrages. The Whigs were embarrassed by their opposition to Sir Robert Peel’s Coercion Bill, because they had justified their tactics by belittling the disorder and lawlessness which that measure was designed to repress. Many of their own supporters accordingly complained bitterly when Ministers, on the 7th of August, invited the House to prolong the expiring Irish Arms Act till May, 1847. Lord John Russell’s only excuse was, that there was a distinction to be drawn between the proposal of new coercive legislation, and a request to prolong an existing law, without which it was impossible to curb the mania for buying arms and ammunition which was seizing the Irish peasantry. The spirit and tone of the Opposition speeches during the debate on Peel’s coercive measure conveyed, and were meant to convey, to the people of England and Ireland the impression that the Whigs were opposed, not merely to a Coercion Bill, but to a coercive policy, and the distinction between proposing new and prolonging old but expiring repressive legislation was generally felt to be a distinction without a difference. Lord Seymour forced Lord John Russell to withdraw the clauses in the Arms Act relating to domiciliary visits and the branding of arms; but, though this enabled the Government to carry the second reading of the measure on the 10th of August, it was ultimately abandoned on the 17th. On that day the Government fell back on an alternative policy. They introduced a remedial scheme for the purpose of empowering local authorities (baronial sessions) to employ the destitute Irish people on relief works started by State advances, to be repaid in ten years at 3½ per cent. To meet the case of poor districts where repayment was impossible, an appropriation of £50,000--a ridiculously small sum--was set aside for grants in aid. Parliament, in sheer weariness, sanctioned this project, although it was warned that the scheme would divert public money from the improvement of the land to the construction of useless roads and bridges, and tempt the peasantry to neglect husbandry for well-paid labour on superfluous public works. As Mr. Disraeli subsequently said, its effect was to set a population as great as that of Holland to break stones on the roads, and, he might have added, on good roads, that were too often broken up that they might be unnecessarily remetalled.