_Peabody._ He’s no better than a stone that denies it. Nevertheless, it is a little hard that for so many years there should be a running account of misery and profit between tenants and landlords; and at the last, when misery sinks to famine, we should be called on to make up the balance, pocketed years ago by others. There’s a passage, I remember, in Mr Disraeli’s--I don’t mean young Benjamin’s--“Curiosities,” that’s taken from a sermon, and it runs somehow so: “If you ladies and gentlemen who are fattening on your pleasures, and wear scarlet clothes--I believe, if you were put in a good press, we should see the blood of the poor gush out with which your scarlet is dyed.” Now, if a good many Irish landlords were squeezed after this fashion, their pockets would run scarlet too. _Nutts._ Didn’t Sir Walter Rawley bring potatoes from the New World? I thought so. ’Pon my life! when I think of it, they almost seem as if they’d been sent from the New World to revenge the wickedness she’d suffered from the Old. We made slaves with whips and chains; and the New World, waiting her time--for the wheel of right and wrong comes round, let it turn ever so slowly--makes slaves with potatoes. What do you think of that, Mr Peabody? _Peabody._ Why, I think that Mr M’Neile, or any other of the illustrators of Providence--and pretty fiery pictures they’ve painted about it lately--wouldn’t grudge half-a-crown for that thought. Why, he’d beat it into a discourse of an hour and a half long, and print and publish it for a shilling afterwards. _The Potato in its Iniquity!_ Depend on it, Mr M’Neile would make a grand thing of it; showing that Irish landlords had nothing to do with the famine, but that the whole of the potato blight was nothing more than the wickedness of Cortez and such fellows--all Catholics, be it remembered--coming up more than two hundred years afterwards. The rottenness of present potatoes no other than the whips and chains of bygone centuries coming to a head! There would be something grand in this. Whereas, to lay the blight upon the Maynooth Grant isn’t worthy of the old woman who cursed the Pope for inventing the scarlet fever. _Nutts._ Whatever brought the blight, I hope they’ll never trust to ’tatoes again. For my part, I shall never again think of fields of ’em in Ireland, without thinking every root a human slave: fields of misery, and want, and death. I’ve read somewhere of a certain root, that when men eat it they are turned to brutes: well, the potato’s very like it; for, living upon nothing else, it takes the best part of a man clean out of him: it takes away his respect from himself; and when that’s the case, a man’s lost, and may as well go upon all fours at once. And then for the landlords---- _Slowgoe._ I will not sit any longer in the shop, and hear those worthy and most unfortunate gentlemen abused. As for the National Debt, as a lover of the institutions of my country, I’m bound to think it’s a blessing.