It is the duty of the historian, and not the task of the traveller, to trace national catastrophes to their real causes--often to be found concealed under much adventitious matter, and when found often surprising from their insignificance--and I leave it, therefore, to others to specify the particular feature of Irish cookery that tends to create a disinclination to paying rent. That the agitated demeanour of the after-dinner speakers during Irish tenant-right meetings' was due solely to the infuriating and ferocious course of food to which they had just submitted, is as certain as that the extraordinary class of noises, cavernous and hollow-sounding, produced by their applausive audiences was owing to the fact that they had not dined at all. In the West of Ireland (where I travelled with those "experts in constitutional treason" who were then organizing the "No Rent" agitation), the agitators and conspirators had no time for long dinners, as the mobs outside were as impatient as hunger, so they sat down, invariably, to everything at once--mutton, bacon, sausages, turkey and ham, with relays of hot potatoes every two minutes. While one conspirator was addressing the peasantry, the upper half of his body thrust out of the lower half of the window, and only his legs in the dining-room, the rest were eating against time, and as soon as the speaker's legs were seen to get up on tiptoe, which they always did for the peroration, the next to speak had to rise from his food. The result was of course incoherent violence. But a closer analysis is required to detect the causes of Irish dislike to rent. That it would be eventually found that potatoes and patriotism have an occult affnity I have no doubt; but, as I have said above, such research more properly belongs to the province of the historian. The Spartan stirring his black broth with a spear revealed his nature at once, and the single act of the Scythians, using their beefsteaks for saddles until they wanted to eat them, gives at a glance their character to the nation. At any rate, it is as old as Athenaeus that "to cookery we owe well-ordered States;" for States result from the congregation of individuals in towns, and towns are the sum of agglomerated households, and households, it is notorious, never combine except for the sociable consumption of food. So long as, in the Dark Ages, every man cooked for himself, or, in the primitive days of cannibalism, helped himself to a piece of a raw neighbour, there could be no friendly heartiness at meals; but, as soon as cooks appeared, men met fearlessly round a common board, towns grew up round the dinner-table, and, as Athenaeus remarks, well-ordered States grew up round the towns. But if we were to judge of the prospects of the people who live, say, about Green River or North Platte, by the character of the food (as supplied to travellers) the opinion could not be very complimentary or encouraging.