two manufacturers of great eloquence obtained seats, and year after year urged the entire repeal of all duties on corn with great earnestness, though for some time their arguments made but little impression on the House.  Their motions were rejected in 1842 by a majority of 300; in 1843 by one exceeding 250; in 1844 by above 200; and in 1845 by one of more than 130 in a much smaller House.  But this last division had scarcely been taken when an unprecedented calamity—­the almost entire failure of the potato crop, which was attacked in nearly every part of both islands by a new disease, the cause of which is not to this day fully ascertained—­ suddenly changed the aspect of the subject.  To the English farmer and laborer it was a severe loss; to the Irish farmer it was ruin; to the Irish peasant famine.  The grain harvest, too, was generally deficient.  And it was evident that rigorous measures, promptly taken, were indispensable, if a large portion of the peasantry in the southern and western provinces of Ireland were not to be left to perish of actual starvation.  In the face of so terrible an emergency Peel acted with great decision.  On his own responsibility he authorized the purchase of a large supply of Indian corn from the United States, hoping, among other indirect effects of such a step, to accustom the Irish to the use of other kinds of food besides the root on which hitherto they had too exclusively relied.[269] And he laid before his colleagues in the cabinet a proposal to suspend the existing Corn-law “for a limited period,” a measure which all saw must lead to its eventual repeal.  It would be superfluous now to recapitulate the discussions which took place, the various alternative proposals which were suggested, or the dissensions in the cabinet to which his proposal gave birth; the resignation of the ministry, and its subsequent resumption of office, when Lord Stanley and Lord John Russell had found it impossible to form an administration.  It is sufficient to say that, as soon as Parliament met, Sir Robert brought forward a bill to reduce the duty on corn to four shillings, a price only half of the lowest fixed duty that had ever been proposed before, that reduction, too, being a stepping-stone to the abolition of all duties, at the end of three years, beyond a shilling a quarter, which was to be retained, in order to acquire an accurate knowledge of the quantity of grain imported.  The diminution, however, of this duty was not the whole object of his new measure.  It included other arrangements which would serve as a compensation to the agriculturists, by relieving them from some of the peculiar burdens to which the land was subjected; and it contained, farther, a reduction or abolition of import duties hitherto levied on many other articles, especially on such as “formed the clothing of the country,” on the fair ground that if the removal of protection from the agriculturist were “a sacrifice for the common good,” the commercial and manufacturing interests might justly be required to make a similar sacrifice for the same patriotic object.