feeling for the potato where the Irish are concerned. Under the head of “Ireland” I find, among others, the following sentences: “Introduced by Raleigh in 1610, the cultivation of this dangerous tuber developed with extraordinary rapidity.” “When Petty wrote, early in Charles II.’s reign, this demoralizing esculent was already the national food.” “When the ‘precarious exotic’ failed, an awful famine was the result.” _The Encyclopædia Britannica_ also obliges us with the appended information: “The labor of one man could plant potatoes enough to feed forty.… Potatoes cannot be kept very long, but there was no attempt to keep them at all; they were left in the ground, and dug as required. A frost which penetrated deep caused the famine of 1739. Even with the modern system of storing in pits, the potato does not last through the summer, and the ‘meal months’—June, July and August—always brought great hardship.… Between 1831 and 1842, there were six seasons of dearth, approaching in some places to famine.… In 1845 the population had swelled to 8,295,061, the greater part of whom depended on the potato only.” The greater part of the population of Ireland proper—that is to say of Ireland with Northern Diamond left out—depends upon the potato to this day. It is a state of affairs which cannot be too severely deprecated; it is a state of affairs which ought in no circumstances to be allowed to continue; it is a state of affairs which convinces one only too clearly that Ireland has for centuries been governed either by rogues or by blockheads. Yet the potato, like the tourist, does not appear hitherto to have been written down for an Irish grievance or injustice. True, _The Encyclopædia Britannica_ condemns it as we have seen; but it does so rather by innuendo than of set purpose. I am not aware that the restriction of potato growing has ever figured as a plank in the platform of the Irish Party. Indeed, to suggest it, would have looked like infamy in the face of the condition of the people. But until the Irish are taught that the potato is not the first and last thing God made, they will remain open to the disasters and the disabilities which too great a dependence upon it have invariably brought about. It is lamentable to note the limitations of the Irish mind as to what is possible in the matter of food. With sixpence, your indigenous, starving Irishman will purchase inevitably a dish of potatoes and as much whisky as can be screwed out of the money when the potatoes have been paid for. The beer and bread and cheese, or bread and bacon of the English rustic may be reckoned a Lucullian feast in comparison, and they are at least three times more nourishing to the body, if not to the brain. And the worst of it is, that your proper potato-fed Irishman cannot forego his hereditary appetite for the “esculent” aliment of his country any more than a Scotchman can forego oatmeal and offal. In the midst of plenty an Irishman of the Irish will