THE POTATO DISEASE

Accounts received from different parts of Ireland show that the disease in the potato crop is extending far and wide, and causing great alarm amongst the peasantry. Letters from resident landlords feelingly describe the misery and consternation of the poor people around them, and earnestly urge the imperative necessity of speedy intervention on the part of the Government to ascertain the actual extent of the calamity, and provide wholesome food as a substitute for the deficient supply of potatoes. Mr. John Chester, of Kilscorne House, in Magshole, in the county of Louth, in a letter to the Dublin Evening Post, states that he has a field of twenty acres of potatoes, which, up to the 3rd instant, had been perfectly dry and sound, when they were attacked by the blight, and three-fourths of them are so diseased and rotten that pigs decline to eat them. This, he says, is the case all through the county of Louth. The Belfast News Letter has a still more lamentable account. It says, "We have abstained from occupying our space with the accounts of the prevalence of this calamity in various places, for this reason, that it may be here stated, once for all, that there is hardly a district in Ireland in which the potato crops at present are uninfected-- perhaps we might say, hardly a field."