Lest it should be assumed that the tiller of land at least had profited by the Napoleonic Wars, with their consequent high prices, let me hasten to add that the Grey Commission, reporting in 1836, had to inform the Government that 2,385,000 persons, nearly one-third of the population, were "in great need of food." "Their habitations," the Report proceeds, "are wretched hovels; several of the family sleep together on straw, or on the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes not even so much to cover them.

Their food commonly consists of dry potatoes; and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day....

They sometimes get a herring or a little milk, but they never get meat except at Christmas, Easter, and Shrovetide." But a truce to these dismal chronicles.

The _post hoc_ may be taken as established; was it a _propter hoc_?
Was the Union the cause as well as the antecedent of this decay?
No economist, acquainted with the facts, can fail to answer in the affirmative.

The causal connection between two realities could not be more manifest.