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.  The summer of 1845 had been a long season of wet and cold and sunlessness.  In the autumn the news went abroad that the whole potato crop of Ireland was in danger of destruction, if not already actually destroyed.  Before attention had well been awakened to the crisis, it was officially announced that more than one-third of the entire potato crop had been swept away by the disease, and that it had not ceased its ravages, but, on the contrary, was spreading more and more every day.

The general impression of those who could form an opinion was that the whole of the crop must perish.  The Anti-Corn-Law League cried out for the opening of the ports and the admission of grain and food from all places.  Sir Robert Peel was decidedly in favor of such a course.  The Duke of Wellington and Lord Stanley opposed the idea, and the proposition was given up.  Only three members of the Cabinet supported Sir Robert Peel’s proposals—­Lord Aberdeen, Sir James Graham, Mr. Sidney Herbert.  All the others objected, some because they opposed the principle of the measure, and were convinced that if the ports were once opened they would never be closed again, which indeed was probably Peel’s own conviction; and others on the ground that no sufficient proof had yet been given that such a measure was necessary.  Lord John Russell, almost immediately after, wrote a letter from Edinburgh to his constituents, the electors of the city of London, in which he declared that something must immediately be done, that it was “no longer worth while to contend for a fixed duty,” and that an end must be put to the whole system of protection, as “the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter division among classes, the cause of penury, fever, and crime among the people.”  This letter produced a decisive effect on Peel.  He saw that the Whigs were prepared to unite with the Anti-Corn-Law League in agitating for the total repeal of the corn laws, and he therefore made up his mind to recommend to the Cabinet an early meeting of Parliament, with the view to anticipate the agitation which he saw must succeed in the end, and to bring forward, as a Government measure, some scheme which should at least prepare the way for the speedy repeal of the corn laws.