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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.


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