From that day their doom was sealed; the landlords began to call loudly for their disfranchisement, and accordingly they were disfranchised by the Relief Bill of 1829, but of course they still retained their little holdings. Immediately the landlords began to utter bitter complaints of surplus population; they began to ventilate their grievances through the English and Irish press, saying that their land was overrun by cottiers and squatters--the main cause of all this being kept in the background, namely, the immense and continuous increase of forty-shilling freeholders, by themselves, and for their own purposes. But the moment those poor men presumed to vote according to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, they were sacrificed to landlord indignation; they were declared to be an incumbrance on the soil that ought to be removed. Landlords began to act upon this view: they began to evict, to exterminate, to consolidate; and in this fearful work the awful Famine of '47 became a powerful, and I fear in many cases even a welcome, auxiliary to the Crowbar Brigade.[56] Thus was the cultivation of the potato extended in various ways, until it had become the principal food of nineteen-twentieths of the population long before the Famine of '47. FOOTNOTES: [1] Raleigh earned this property by some terrible services. He was an officer in the expedition of the Lord Deputy Gray, when he attacked the Italian camp on _Dun-an-oir_, at Smerwick harbour in Kerry. After some time the Italians yielded, but on what precise terms it is now impossible to say, the accounts of the transaction are so various and conflicting. Indeed, O'Daly says the English were the first to send a flag of truce. Anyhow, the Italian garrison, which had come to aid the Irish, fell into the power of the English, and here is Dr. Leland's account of what followed:--"Wingfield was commissioned to disarm them, and when this service was performed an English company was sent into the fort. The Irish rebels found they were reserved for execution by martial law. The Italian general and some of the officers were made prisoners of war, but the garrison was butchered in cold blood; _nor is it without pain that we find a service so horrid and detestable committed to Sir Walter Raleigh_." [2] The people of Quito said _papas_. The Spaniards corrupted this to _battata_, and the Portuguese to the softer _batata_.