A temporary suspension of rent-payments and the closing of the ports would have saved the great body of the people.

But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines.

The government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to pay.

At the same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised the police on its present basis to ensure that rents should be paid.

To the wisdom of this policy, history is able to call witnesses by the million--unhappily however it has to call them from famine graveyards, and the waste womb of the Atlantic.
This essential wrongness of Unionism, so amply illustrated in every year of its working, continues.