nature. It was palatable food, as it became
acclimatized; it grew where no other plant fit for human food would
grow; it was a great fertilizer; it was prolific: no wonder the poor
Celt of our bogs and mountains, in time, made the potato more associated
with the name of Ireland than it ever was with its native country,
Virginia.

Before 1729 we have no record of the potato having suffered from blight
or frost, or anything else. But this is not to be wondered at; even
though such things occurred, the outlaws, who were its chief
cultivators, excited neither interest nor pity in the hearts of the
ruling minority. They were watched and feared; they were known to be
numerous; and many were the plans set on foot to reduce their numbers,
and cause them to become extinct, like the red deer of their native
hills. Surely, then, a potato blight, followed by a famine, would not be
regarded as a calamity, unless it affected the English colony. The
Celtic nation in Ireland could have no record of such a visitation,
unless in the fugitive ballad of some hedge schoolmaster.[39] Anyhow,
the Celt, forced to live for the most part, in barren wilds, where it
was all but impossible to raise sufficient food, found the potato his
best friend, and his race increased and multiplied upon it, in spite of
that bloody code which ignored his existence, and with regard to which
Lord Clare, no friend to Ireland, thus expresses his views in his speech
on the Union: "The Parliament of England seem to have considered the
permanent debility of Ireland as the best security of the British
crown, and the Irish Parliament to have rested the security of the
colony upon maintaining a perpetual and impossible barrier against the
ancient inhabitants of the country."[40]

Another cause for the increased cultivation of the potato may be found
in the poverty of the English colony itself. Whilst the people of whom
that colony was composed, through the Parliament that represented them,
pursued the Catholic natives with unmitigated persecution, they were
themselves the object of jealous surveillance, both by the Parliament
and the commercial classes of England. Long before the times of which I
am writing, the English always showed uneasiness at the least appearance
of amalgamation between the descendants of the Norman invaders and the
natives, although their fears on this head were to a great extent set at
rest by the change of religion in England, which change exten