the country is one which we must all understand—one of distrust and alarm. And why? Is it not because the price of provisions are rising, and that there is an apprehended scarcity before us? It has been said that the Corn Law was a law to secure plenty, and to secure it from our own soil. If that be true, then in this hour of apprehended scarcity, of distrust and alarm, what is there to which we should so readily turn, in the hope of relief, as to this very Corn Law, which has been pronounced to be the height of legislative wisdom." Mr. Bright proceeded to show that Peel's pet law was now working precisely as its supporters wished it to work. "It was," he said, " to prevent the trade in corn—to make you and your fellow-men—the twenty-seven millions—work and work, and scramble and scramble, and starve it may be, in order that out of the produce of your industry-out of the scanty wages of the many, something may be taken by law, and handed over to the rich and to the great by whom the law was made." He went on to compare the present condition of the country under the Corn Law with what it would be under no Corn Law, and then referred to the improved state of the registrations, and the increased number of freeholds, as ground of encouragement to increased energy, and concluded by saying: "How dreadful the abandonment of duty, how awful the crime, not less than that of those who made the Corn Law, if we step back from our place, if we fail in the work we have set ourselves, which is to abolish the law that restricts the bounty of Providence, and to establish the original and heaven-given law, which will give plenty to all the earth."
Cabinet councils were held on the Friday after this meeting, on Saturday the 1st, on Monday the 3rd, and on Thursday the 5th of November. It was said that the ministers were deliberating upon the alarming accounts which had reached them from Ireland, and that Peel had been unable to bring his colleagues to consent that parlia-
