towns at the expense of the country. If Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_ is not English, it is not Irish. By the year 1780, when Lord North from fear of rebellion granted free trade to Ireland with Great Britain, the mischief had been made almost incurable. The great increase in the Irish population, like the great increase in the English, may be said to begin in a free trade movement. In the worst days of legal persecution it might have been said of the Irish Catholic population, the more they were afflicted the more they multiplied and grew. Lavergne[445] thinks their greater increase was due first to the physiological law, that in the case of all animals the means of reproduction are multiplied in proportion to the chances of destruction[?], and second to the instinctively sound tactics of a people otherwise defenceless. The probability is, too, that they remained quiet under their multitudinous industrial, political, and religious disqualifications so long, because they were reduced to that depth of misery that kills the very power of resistance; and poverty at its extreme point is a positive but not a preventive check on population. Where things are so bad, marriage, it is thought, cannot make them worse, and marriage would go on at the expense of a high mortality, general pauperism, or continuous emigration. The pureness of marriage relations in Ireland, though in itself a much greater good than its consequences were evil, acted as it would have done in Godwin’s Utopia;[446] apart from wisdom, virtue itself had its evils. Potatoes by-and-by came into general use; and the bad harvests, which taught even the Scotch and English poor[447] to make frequent use of this substitute for corn, converted it in Ireland from a substitute into a staple. Economists viewed this change with almost unanimous disapproval. In the view of Malthus it was the cheapness of this food that made it dangerous for the labourers; his theory of wages led him to object to cheap corn on the same grounds.[448] On the principle that it needs difficulties to generate energy, the Irish are made indolent by their cheap food, and make no use of it except to increase by it. Living on the cheapest food procurable, they could not in scarcity fall back on anything else. Every man who wished to marry might obtain a cabin and potatoes.[449] At the lowest calculation, an acre of land planted with potatoes will support twice as much as one of the same quality sown with wheat.[450] There are other objections to a potato diet. It is a simple (as opposed to a composite) diet, and it involves a low standard of comfort. The second is not the same as the first, for a people that had no variety in their food might conceivably have a great variety in their other comforts. As a matter of fact, however, it was none of these three supposed disadvantages of the potato that proved the bane of the Irish population, but a fourth one, its liability to blight.[451]