bloodthirsty plots, thickly strewn in our path as we journey through
this dismal period of our history--reveal to us, as it were by accident,
that there was another people in this island, besides those whom the law
regarded as the nation; but they had no rights, they were outlaws--"the
Irish enemy." One hundred and fifty years ago Primate Boulter expressed
his belief that those outlaws made four-fifths of the population, and
the English colony only one-fifth; but the colonists held the rich
lands; the bulk of the people, who formed the real nation, were in the
bogs, the lonely glens, and on the sterile mountains, where agriculture
was all but impossible, except to the great capitalist. Capital they had
none, and they were forced to subsist, as best they could, on little
patches of tillage among the rocks, whose _debris_ made the land around
them in some sort susceptible of cultivation. By degrees those outlaws
discovered that the potato, coming from the high moist soil of Quito,
found in the half-barren wilds of Ireland, if not a climate, a soil at
least congenial to its 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