Page:History of the Anti corn law league - Volume 2.pdf/409

dener here and there, a farmer, an Irish cottier, saw a brown spot appear on the margin of the potatos, and did not remember to have seen such a thing before. The brown spot grew black, and spread and covered the stalk, till a whole potatos field looked as if a scorching wind had passed over it. Yet, perhaps, the roots might appear to be in a good state; and one man would let the plants alone, while another would move off the tops and wait to see what happened. The stealthy rain, by some means yet as mysterious as ever, generated some minute plague-of what nature nobody yet knows, if indeed it is certain that the rain was the instrument; a plague so minute that no microscope has yet convicted it, yet so powerful that it was soon to overthrow governments, and derange commerce, and affect for all time to come the political fate of England, and settle the question of the regeneration or the destruction of Ireland. The minute plague spread and spread, till it blackened thousands of acres and destroyed the food of millions of men. In some wholesome regions, the last to be affected, the inhabitants would hardly believe what they read. The newspapers were exaggerating shamefully for some political object; the League was trading on the rain and frightening the public, private correspondents were credulous and too fond of excitement; their own potatoes, and those of their neighbours', looked very well; and the clergy were again ready with rebuke for anxiety and doubt, saying that there had always been talk about bad weather, but that, somehow or other, there was always a harvest. When, in such a favoured region, two or three benevolent gentry stored up their own sound potatoes for the use of the sick and aged in case of need, and laid in rice and macaroni, and other substitutes, for winter use at their own tables, their neighbours for a time laughed at the precaution, and said that potatoes were abundant and excessively cheap in the markets. But soon the change appeared even in these healthiest district. A man might