succeed better, because the thing at least is possible."

Potato culture was clearly on the increase; the corn crop, however, was
still looked to as the food of the nation. But if the growing of
potatoes was on the increase, it seems to have partly arisen from the
very necessity of the case. There was not land enough under tillage to
give food to the people, it was laid down for grazing. Mountains, poor
lands, and bogs were unsuitable to graziers, nor yet would they yield
wheat, nor, in many instances, oats, or any white crop whatever; but the
potato was found to succeed very well in such places, and to give a
larger quantity of sustenance than such land would otherwise yield. Its
cultivation was therefore spreading, but spreading, it would seem,
chiefly amongst the poor Celtic natives, who had to betake themselves to
the despised wastes and barren mountains. In the rich lowlands, and
therefore amongst the English colony (for whom alone all the
publications of those times were intended), the potato was still a
despised article of food. And to this the latter part of the above-cited
passage points. The proposal to sustain the people on potatoes and
buttermilk until the new corn should come in, is evidently an ironical
one, really meant to convey the degradation to which grazing had brought
the country. Seventy or eighty years later the irony became a sad and
terrible reality.

Meantime increased attention was given to the improvement of
agriculture, arising, in a great measure, from the widespread panic
which the passion for grazing had caused. Good and patriotic men saw but
one result from it, a dangerous and unwise depopulation, and they called
aloud for remedies against so terrible a calamity. The Author of the
"Answer to the Memorial" quoted above, says, with bitter sarcasm:--"You
are concerned how strange and surprising it would be in foreign parts to