This was a time when the population was increasing, but agriculture, so far from increasing in proportion to the number of mouths to feed, was positively declining, unless it were the culture of the potato. In a pamphlet of about 1724, on promoting agriculture and employing the poor, the complaint is of beef and mutton everywhere, and an insufficiency of corn. “Such a want of policy,” says one, “is there, in Dublin especially, on the most important affair of bread, without a plenty of which the poor must starve.” Another, a Protestant, has the following threat for the clergymen of the Established Church: “I’ll immediately stock one part of my land with bullocks, and the other with potatoes--so farewell tithes[432]!” From this it is to be inferred that potatoes were not made tithable until a later period, pasture being exempted to the last. For whatever reason, grazing, and not corn-growing, was then more general in Ireland than in the generations immediately preceding, much land having gone out of tillage. The culture of the potato was driven out of the fertile lowlands to the hill-sides, so as to leave the ground clear for ranges of pasture. Rack-renting was the rule, doubtless owing to the same reason as afterwards, the competition for farms. While the Protestants emigrated in thousands, the Catholics multiplied at home in beggary. A pamphleteer of 1727 says: “Where the plough has no work, one family can do the business of fifty, and you may send away the other forty-nine.” Thus we find the pasturing of cattle preferred to agriculture long after the barbaric or uncivilized period had passed, preferred indeed by English landlords or farmers[433]. There were three bad harvests in succession, 1726, 1727 and 1728, culminating in a famine in the latter year. Boulter, archbishop of Armagh, who then ruled Ireland, was able to buy oats or oatmeal in the south and west so as to sell it below the market price to the starving Protestants of Ulster, an interference with the distribution of food which led to serious rioting in Cork, Limerick, Clonmel and Waterford in the first months of 1728[434]. No full accounts of the epidemic fever of that famine remain. Rutty, of Dublin, says it was “mild and deceitful in its first attack, attended with a depressed pulse, and frequently with petechiae[435];” while, according to Rogers and O’Connell[436], the epidemic fever of Munster was the same. Of the famine itself we have a glimpse or two. Primate Boulter writes to the Duke of Newcastle on 7 March, 1727: “Last year the dearness of corn was such that thousands of families quitted their habitations to seek bread elsewhere, and many hundreds perished; this year the poor had consumed their potatoes, which is their winter subsistence, near two months sooner than ordinary, and are already, through the dearness of corn, in that want that in some places they begin already to quit their habitations[437].”