Meantime increased attention was given to the improvement of agriculture, arising, in a great measure, from the widespread panic which the passion for grazing had caused.  Good and patriotic men saw but one result from it, a dangerous and unwise depopulation, and they called aloud for remedies against so terrible a calamity.  The Author of the “Answer to the Memorial” quoted above, says, with bitter sarcasm:—­“You are concerned how strange and surprising it would be in foreign parts to hear that the poor were starving in a rich country....  But why all this concern of the poor?  We want them not as the country is now managed; they may follow thousands of their leaders, and seek their bread abroad.  Where the plough has no work, one family can do the business of fifty, and you may send away the other forty-nine.  An admirable piece of husbandry never known or practised by the wisest nations, who erroneously thought people to be the riches of a country.”

This anxious desire to prevent the country from “running into grazing,” called forth many treatises and pamphlets on the improvement of agriculture.  Some writers undertook to show that agriculture was more profitable than grazing; others turned their attention to improve the implements of husbandry, and to lay down better rules for the rotation of crops.  Potatoes must have been pretty extensively grown at this time, and yet they do not get a place in any of the rotations given.  We have fallow, wheat, oats, rye, turnips, saintfoin, lucerne, barley, peas, beans, clover, rye-grass, and even buck-wheat, tares and lentils rotated in various ways, but the potato is never mentioned.  The growth of turnips is treated with special importance.  Hops, too, receive much consideration, and the Royal Dublin Society published in 1733 careful and elaborate instructions for their growth and management.  The reason the growing of potatoes gets no place in any of the rotations of this period seems to be, that their culture was chiefly confined to the poor Celtic population in the mountainous and neglected districts; or, as the author whose pamphlet has a short introduction from Swift[12] says, “to the Popish parts of the kingdom.”  Those who wrote in favour of tillage instead of grazing, set great importance on the increase of population, and bewailed emigration as the effect of bad harvests and want of tillage.  All such observations made at this period must be taken as referring to the English colony, or Protestant population, exclusively, for there was no desire to keep the Catholics from emigrating; quite the contrary; but they were utterly ignored in the periodical literature of the time, except when some zealot called for a more strict enforcing of the laws “to prevent the growth of Popery.”  And this view is supported by the writer quoted above, who says it would be for the “Protestant interest” to encourage tillage.  Primate Boulter, bewailing the emigration which resulted from the famine of 1728,