A gentleman who is universally applauded as a handler of the pencil and a smart after-dinner speaker lately remarked that if he were compelled to give up one of two things, to wit, tobacco or Christianity, he would give up Christianity. Then, with a slack-minded man’s weakness, he went on to explain that a Christianity which prohibited tobacco would not be Christianity at all. “When all things were made,” we are told, “nothing was made better than tobacco.” Without being an anti-tobacconist, without being a non-smoker, without, indeed, being other than “a great blower of the cloud,” it is quite reasonable for one to doubt whether on the whole tobacco is the blessing that modern men hold it to be. Thereis no evidence to show that men’s intellects have improved since the introduction of smoking. It seems probable that the high-water mark of British brains had been reached somewhat prior to the time in which James I. had occasion to adorn polite letters with his notorious “Counterblast.” Shakespeare did not smoke. Mitcham shag was nothing to Ben Jonson, nor navy plug to Milton. It is our Barries, and our J. K. Jeromes, and our F. C. Goulds who electrify the country with their pipes in their mouths. Now, the person who is commonly credited with having introduced the art and practise of tobacco smoking into England is Sir Walter Raleigh. There is a legend that when that gentleman’s servant first saw him smoking, he rushed out for a bucket of water, in the belief that his master was on fire. By a strange coincidence, it is this same Sir Walter Raleigh who is commonly credited with having introduced the potato into Ireland. Could Sir Walter Raleigh’s servant have perceived what black andfearsome troubles the potatoes in his master’s pockets or other receptacle would one day call down upon the Irish people, it is conceivable that he might have rushed out for something even more drastic than a bucket of water. The potato, undoubtedly, is an elegant fruit. All men know that with beef, mutton, and flesh meats in general, it is everything that could be desired. As a staple article of food, however, it cannot be considered otherwise than as a flagrant and wicked mistake. In Ireland the potato has become a staple article of food. Whole generations of Irishmen have battened upon it—in good times, with the addendum of a little buttermilk or a scrap of bacon, in bad times with the addendum of a pinch of salt. And as the times in Ireland have been immemorially bad times, the pinch of salt has been most frequently to the fore. In plain words, the Irish people are a potato-fed people. In theory the potato might well have been specially created by Providence to fit in with the Irish temperament. The Irishtemperament has distinct tendencies in the direction of indolence; the potato, heaven be thanked, is a tuber which does not demand too great a skill or too great an amount of labor in cultivation. You cut it up, dump it into the ground, and it grows of itself. Also it is a prolific plant, and will make more dead weight to the rood than almost anything else that grows—the which, of course, saves digging. A peasant with a potato-patch is believed to be wholly beyond the reach of hunger, and his standard of emolument may conveniently be adjusted for him accordingly. He himself is aware that it is out of his potato-patch that he and his family have got to subsist, and that all the rest is luxury of the most bloated order. Philosophers can invariably dispense with luxury, and the Irishman is a philosopher. He can afford to sit and watch his potatoes growing, as content as any king. For not only shall that green plant yield unto him and the “childer” the staff of life, but it shall also furnish for him thewherewithal for the innocent manufacture of potheen, which is life itself. It is a singular fact, though a fact big with meaning, that while the Irishman has been a potato-grower from Raleigh’s time, he has not succeeded in attracting to himself any special reputation as a cultivator in this department. Nobody sets up the Irish potato for a peculiar delicacy. Jersey, Cheshire, Lancashire, and parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire have secured for themselves all the glory and honor and profit which is to be got out of potato-growing. It is said, however, that the Irish can cook a potato against anybody in the world; but this is doubtful, inasmuch as the Dublin potato—and for that matter the Cork or Kilkenny or Newry potato—is neither better nor worse cooked than the common tuber of Cockaigne. This, however, is by the way. The hard fact is that all over Ireland you are brought face to face with a poverty and a desolation which are the palpable outcome of too great a reliance upon a doubtful staple.The very physique of the people bears abundant witness to the circumstance that a diet of pure potato is not good for one. It induces a ricketiness of build, a lankness and a want of tone; not to mention a confirmed hungriness of look. Quite half the people of Ireland might pass for persons who had lately been emulating the fasting man, or had just been let loose from a severe term of penal servitude. It is intolerable that it should be so, but there is no getting away from it. The Irish people are physiologically underfed. They may eat to repletion, but as even an Irish potato consists mainly of starch and water, precious little corporeal good is to be got out of it. When the body is starved, the mind dwindles and languishes. A potato-fed man can no more be witty or wise or energetic than a man fed on draff and husks. That is why the Irish have almost entirely lost the spirits and the volatility and the graces for which they were formerly renowned. If you are to make good use of anIrishman, as of any other man, you must ply him with nutriment. The potato is not nutriment in anything like a complete sense. Even that exceedingly popular work,The Encyclopædia Britannica, has no 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 Britannicaalso 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 systemof 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 Britannicacondemns it as we have seen; but it does so rather by innuendothan 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-fedIrishman 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 make for potatoes as surely as the needle makes for the north. He prefers them. To take an instance, Mr. George Bernard Shaw believes himself to be a vegetarian by free-will and out of altruism. In point of fact, vegetarianism is easy and possible for him, because he is an Irishman, and consequently comes of an ingrained, potato-feeding stock, however remote. His wit and other parts, if any, are to be accounted for by the circumstance that he has the good sense to supplement his potato-flour with pea-meal, coco-butter, and other garnishes. A few thousand tons of lentils, with pepper and salt to taste, would do Ireland more good than a new Land Act. She has had enough potato and enough Land Acts to last her for the next hundred years.
In Ireland the pig has long been understood to pay the rent. Hence, no doubt, it comes to pass that Irish rents are not always paid up. That an animal such as the pig, a grunting, groveling wallower in sloughs, should be so popular a favorite among the Irish does not speak too well for them. In England the favorite and most bepraised domestic beast is the dog. The keeping of a pup of some sort is a mark of true English blood. Dogs in Ireland do not appear to be so popular. The fact is, of course, that the pig has been thrust down the Irish throat by greedy, grasping landlordism. Their worships, the factors and agents, perceiving that good man Patrick was hard put to it for the means of subsistence when he had satisfiedtheir rapacious demands, informed him blithely that a pig would make an admirable domestic pet and addendum to the potato-patch, and, unlike a common dog, could, when you have petted him to a certain sleekness, be killed and eaten, or salted and sold. So that the wild Irishman has taken to pig-keeping with a zest which is without parallel among other races; whereas for dogs he has little or no room. The English collier, who on being met in a lane with a couple of fine terriers, was asked by a thrifty land-holder if he, the collier, might not have shown greater wisdom had he spent his money on pigs rather than on terriers, replied: “Perhaps so, but a man would look a damned fool going ratting wi’ two pigs.” One supposes that in Ireland if the people ever do go ratting, they do it with these same porkers.
Quite apart from questions of sport, however, the pig is certainly not the sweetest of quadrupeds, and to have him with you continually in the house, like William hadDora, must be something of a trial, rent or no rent. It is notable, as indicating the difference between the treatment meted out to the English and to the Irish, that when a certain woman of Epping, or some such neighborhood, took to the keeping of pigs on the Irish principle, she was swooped down upon by the authorities who have charge of the public sanitation, and compelled to part with her pet. In Ireland you can maintain familiarly in your kitchen as many pigs as you like, and nobody will interfere with you. Possibly the relationship between the Irishman and his pig might be considered reasonable if one were by any means certain that when the pig has discharged his duties as a household pet and come squalling to the knife, he were really meat for the Irishman and his family. I am afraid, however, that in too many instances the people are so frightfully poor that the bulk and best parts of the family pig’s carcass pass out of Ireland on to the breakfast tables of the bloatedEnglish, under the name and guise of Irish provisions. On the whole, one inclines to the view that even as, in the long run, the Irish would be the happier and the better fed without the potato, they might with advantage dispense also with the pig. It sounds like rank heresy, but I commend this suggestion to all thoughtful legislators. The pig requires neither care nor attention in the matter of his bringing up; he is a feeder on refuse and garbage; he would just as soon sleep on your domestic hearth as in the snuggest sty that was ever built, and, generally speaking, he may be considered a very proper beast for association with an indolent man. With the potatoes shooting up merrily forninst your cabin door, and the pig fattening himself gruntingly and without assistance from yourself, you may well recline in honeyed ease and never really trouble to do a day’s work. And it follows that in the course of time you fall irrevocably into the potato-and-pig habit, and acquiesce in thepotato-and-pig standard of living, comfort, and culture. You vegetate like the tuber, and you grunt and snore and thrive on nothing, like the porker. It suits the landlords and the legislators and the philosophers, and it fits in entirely with that taint of indolence which always lurks in the Irish blood. The farming of one pig, not to mention the keeping of pigs in cabins, should be prohibited by Act of Parliament. There would naturally be great howls from the Irish people, for nobody is loved with a greater love, or treated with a greater amount of respect in Ireland, than the single pig. But he is a blight and a mistake, and a failure both economically and socially. The Irish of America, it is true, have made large fortunes out of him. There are cities in America that have been built entirely on pig, and the American pork-packing interest appears to keep quite half the country going. But how have these things been accomplished? Certainly not by the breeding and rearing ofsingle pigs in people’s houses. No, the American Irish have gone in for pig-keeping on wholesale and colossal lines. They have turned the gentleman that pays the rent out of the house into fields and pens, they have made a business of the feeding and fattening of him, and they have erected mammoth factories wherein he may be slaughtered and salted down by the thousand. Ireland might with indisputable advantage take a leaf out of the bulky lard-stained book of Chicago. Irish bacon will always command quite as good a price as the best American that was ever exported. The English market for it is practically inexhaustible, but apparently nobody but the Americans has enterprise or courage enough to exploit that market. In America the pigs for the packing trade are understood to be fed on apples and pea-flour, and I have seen it suggested that because they are amply supplied with these staples, the American pig-feeders will always have the advantage of possible competitors. Thereare neither apples nor pea-flour in Ireland; but there is the potato, and if ever an article of food was designed for a special sort of beast, the potato was designed for the pig. The Irish should endeavor to remember that if the potato have any virtue at all, it was intended for the feeding of pigs, and not of human beings. The English farmer does not, when the dinner hour draws nigh, lead forth his wife and children to his hay-chamber for nutriment, and the Irishman should have just as small a gustatory regard for his store of potatoes. It is pig-feed, my dear Patrick, pig-feed, and not victuals at all. If the English peasantry were to take to a diet of chopped hay and husks to-morrow, the English landlords would not lift a little finger to prevent them, and within a twelvemonth they would adjust matters by putting up rents all round. So long as you, the low wild Irish, choose to be content with the same diet as your household pet, so long may you remain content, and so long will the landlords lookto it that you get no other food. I do not believe for a moment that Ireland is going to be regenerated on political, measure-making Parliamentary lines. Her regeneration will have to come out of herself. So much of it as has already been accomplished has come wholly out of herself, and not out of legislation at all. The rest will follow if the Irish people have a mind to deal as straightly with themselves in the future as they have dealt with themselves in the past. And I should say that at all costs the potato-and-pig habit, as it now exists in Ireland, should be broken, and got rid of, and utterly wiped out.
When Ireland desires to sup the sweeter drops out of the cup of sorrow, she has a way of babbling about exiles from Erin, and that kind of thing. That her population has been greatly reduced by emigration cannot be denied; neither can one get away from the fact that the true-blooded Irishman has a peculiar affection for the soil on which he was born, and that the pains of expatriation have for him a special and almost intolerable poignancy. But excepting as it bears upon the peace of mind of individuals, on the breaking-up of homes, and the wrenching of family ties, I do not think that the emigration which it is the fashion so to deplore has been at all a bad thing for Ireland. It is clear that if the country is incapable of supportingadequately the mass of the people now resident in it, the persons who have left it for fresh woods and pastures new are on the whole to be congratulated. If it be contended that it is shameful that a man should be compelled to leave his native country because that country does not offer sufficient scope for his energies, and fails to provide for him the means of rational human subsistence, I should say that Ireland is by no means singular in such failure. The Scotch emigrate, and boast about it. “Scotland is a stony country,” they say, “there are plenty of mouths and little wherewith to fill them; lo, we will go forth into the undiscovered places of the world, and seek food and fortune where they are most likely to be found.” The Irish, on the other hand, weep and wail, and keen about it. “We are leaving the ould counthry, ochone, wirra, wirra, and wirras-thrue! I’ll sit at the top of Vinegar Hill, and there I’ll weep till I’ve wept my fill, and every tear would turn a mill; for, bedad, it’sacrost the say I’ll be afther goin’, and, glory knows, when I’ll be afther comin’ back again. Good-by, Terence, and Bryan, and Pathrick, and Judy, and Kathleen, and all the rest of yez. It’s me that’s got to leave yez, and may all the leading fiends assail the dhirthy Government!” And so on and so forth. Tears and howls are the Irish emigrant’s stock-in-trade. I do not deny that this is wrong, but it seems possible that a great deal too much capital has been made out of it, both by the poets and by the politicians. Excepting at the immediate hour of embarkation, the Irish emigrant makes a very good emigrant indeed. If his emigration takes him only so far as England, he becomes at once an industrious, and not infrequently a fairly prosperous, member of the community. If his emigration takes him to America the same thing happens to him, and he has been known to blossom out into millionairedom. Why weep for him, why recite touching poetry about him, and why call the Government names on his behoof?It is the people who are left at home who should be cried over, and recited over, and whose condition should provoke the obsecration of the Government. Of course, the real truth about the Irish emigrant is that when he gets into a new country, he is compelled to fall into line with a scheme of existence which is far in advance of anything which has been considered possible in his own country. The great stumbling-blocks of his life, namely, the potato patch and the pig, pass forthwith out of his purview. In England he must live like a civilized being, in a house erected and maintained on lines which conform to the requirements of County Councils and sanitary authorities; very naturally, too, he drops into the English view as to diet, clothing, recreations, and the like, and to secure these things he is compelled to work, maybe twelve, or it may be fourteen hours a day. If the work be hard, it is more or less regular, and the pay is sure, and, from the Irish standpoint, princely. In America,with anything like luck, the Irish emigrant finds himself even more favorably conditioned, and if he possesses an ounce of sense—and he usually does—there are chances for him which lead to prosperity.
At home, in Ireland, the Irishman of the poorer class, and even of the middle class, is absolutely without opportunity. He must take things as they are, and if he ever thinks about such matters at all, resign himself to the mean, and uninspiring facts. There is nothing in Ireland that a man who wishes to get along in life may do; the fact being that the country is exhausted, and devoid of the elements which are necessary to activity. And it seems more than likely that this state of affairs will continue for many years to come. Capital that is not backed up by arrant greed has become extremely rare of late. There is little hope for Ireland in the modern sense, unless she be exploited, and for some reason or other, exploitation is nowadays attempted only by persons without bowels, who,with all their exploiting, succeed only in enriching themselves, and degrading the persons who toil for them. I have said before that Ireland’s true regeneration must come from within. When she took to emigration she began practically this work. For years it has been the only way for her; it will go on just as long as it is necessary and good for her. Meanwhile the people at home must be roused from their apathy. If the gentlemen who periodically stump the country with a miscellaneous selection of political and religious shibboleths would direct some of their energy and oratory to the social and intimate life of the Irish people, they might yet accomplish for Ireland a work that would be of real benefit to her. There is far too much complacency, even in the ranks of Ireland’s best wishers. It is taken for granted that the main body of the people of Ireland are peasants; everybody speaks of them as peasants, and everybody talks of them as peasants. When Goldsmith wrote about “a bold peasantry,their country’s pride,” he did not mean peasantry in the same way that the glib writers and talkers of our own day mean it. The word “peasant,” like many another good word, has had its ups and downs, and for the last half-century, if not for a longer period, “peasant,” as applied to an Irishman, has amounted really to a condemnation and an excuse. “Ah, my dear sir,” cry the wise, “you do not know the Irish peasant!” If one is to believe all that one hears, the Irish peasant is a sort of inferior, inhuman creation. Anything is good enough for him, and, like the dog in the adage, the less you give him and the more you kick him, the better he will like you. One never hears the slackest politician of them all talking or writing about “the English peasant.” It is “the sturdy men of Kent,” “the hardy men of Yorkshire,” and “comrades,” and “fellow-workers,” all the time. These men eat bacon and cheese, and as much beef as they can lay tooth upon; also they drink beer in and outof season and by the bucketful; also their children are reasonably well-fed and reasonably well-clad. There’s not the smallest boy in England but travels in his shoes. Hence the English peasantry retain those qualities of boldness and masterfulness and independence, without which a peasantry cannot thrive. And nobody dare call them “peasants,” nor offer them the treatment which peasants are commonly supposed to delight in. The Irish need to be taught that they are a race of men, and not merely dreamers, and martyrs, and kickable persons. And the first thing for a proper man to do is to make sure that himself and his family live like human beings and compass the food and shelter and decencies which are nowadays considered necessary to human beings. The Irish politicians have helped Ireland to something in the nature of reasonable government; they might now conveniently lay themselves out to help her into something that resembles reasonable living. At the forthcoming General Election, we aretold, great political and party play is to be made with that ancient and bedraggled question, Home Rule. The friends of Ireland, and the friends of England, fancy that they see in it something which is going to be very good for Ireland. In point of fact it is a matter of which next to nothing would have been heard, had not Mr. Balfour stood in sore need of a red herring to drag across the idiot noses of the electorate. From Mr. Balfour’s point of view, no doubt, the resurrection of the Home Rule bogy is a singularly adroit move. It will confuse the fiscal tariff-mongers; it will placate the dunder-headed Liberal party, and it will tickle the Irish to death. But any man who believes for one moment that it will be of the smallest benefit to Ireland is just a fool. England made up her mind long ago that Home Rule for Ireland was a sheer impossibility; and what is more to the point, Ireland proper, and in the mass, is of the same opinion. If she desires to take advantage of the opportunities whicha General Election is bound to provide for her, she will let Home Rule severely alone, and base her demands on less political, but considerably more urgent and vital things.
THE END