exhibit his green and flourishing crop to a stranger, and say that he should take it up on Monday. On that night would come a thunderstorm, and the next morning, if the owner stirred the soil of his blackened field with a pitchfork, up came such a steaming stench as showed him that his field was turned putrid. And then it became known why potatoes were abundant and cheap in the markets. Everybody was eager to sell before his potatoes had time to rot, What was to become of the poor Irish if this went on was now the most anxious question of the time."
The weather was not so constantly gloomy as Miss Martineau has represented it to have been. Until near the end of September there was enough of sunshine to keep alive the hope that the harvest, though late, would not be very much deficient. In the middle of August, the price of wheat had risen to 57s. but by the middle of September it had receded to 54s. It was not until the beginning of October that a great failure of the wheat crop, both as regarded quantity and quality, was acknowledged; and even then, I see that I looked more at the contingent effect of a bad harvest in 1846 than on that of 1845. The potato rot, not only throughout Ireland but all over England and Scotland, was not apprehended. Men hoped for a good harvest, knowing the misery that would follow a bad one, and the hope influenced the judgment. In my paper of the 4th October, I said: "If the harvest of 1846 be bad, or even if it should be such as the one which has now been gathered into the barn-yard, the country will be again plunged into the distress from which it has so recently emerged. Should we fold our arms and wait patiently for the result, or should we demand, and instantly demand, the right of supplying the deficiency of our own harvest, by importing, without duty, the surplus produce of other lands? The League has not been idle. The result of the registrations in certain selected counties, and the rousing in others of a spirit which was supposed to be dead, has thrown conster-
