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 extended in a
very considerable degree to the English colony in Ireland. After the
Reformation there was not much danger of a union between the Catholic
Celt and the Protestant Norman. Still another jealousy remained--a
commercial jealousy. The colonization of Ireland meant, in the English
mind, the complete extirpation of the natives, and the peopling of this
island by the adventurers and their descendants; but it is a strange