 CHAPTER XI The people of America may or may not indulge kindly views of the Irish community, but there cannot be the slightest question that the Irish of Ireland have kindlier feelings for America than ever they have had for England. To the Irish of Ireland, in fact, America has long stood in the relation of a sort of promised land, and they have a habit of turning their thoughts thitherward, even when small matters are concerned. There is a tale of an elderly lady of Galway, who, on being informed by her medical attendant, that it was desirable that she should consult a dental specialist, set forth incontinently for New York, to the total neglect of London. She believed that of the two places New York was the friendlier. I am informed that, broadly speaking, New York is policed by Irish Americans, and that the American Irishman makes a rather useful subordinate municipal official. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that very considerable numbers of Irishmen contrive to do themselves a great deal better in the United States than they could ever have hoped to do in their own native errand. To those Americans and American Irish, who happen to be at all interested in the present condition and prospects of the Green Country, I venture to offer the following pages for what they are worth. CHAPTER I The person who invented the Irish question may or may not deserve well of his species. In his sense, of course, there has been an Irish question since the beginning of history. But it is only within the last century or so that we have begun to spell it with a big cue. That big cue perhaps attained its largest proportions during the eighties of the last century and associated, as it usually was, with a capital G which stood for Gladstone, and a capital P which stood for somebody else. It certainly did yeoman service whenever useful letters could be found. At the time of Mr. Gladstone's home rule campaign, the existence of a highly insistent Irish question could not be doubted. A good deal of water has flowed under the bridges since then, however, and at the present moment, and in view of the present situation of Irish affairs, one is tempted to wonder whether there now exists, or whether there really has ever existed an Irish question with a big cue at all. It is true that at the time of writing there is an actual and undesirable famine raging in Connemara. It is true that the population of the country is on the decline, and that the standard of comfort among the people will not bear comparison with the standard of comfort in any other country in the world, unless it be the poorer and bleaker regions of Camchatka. And it is true also that Irishmen as a body continue to exercise themselves, both at street corners and on all sorts of platforms, in a habit of rhetoric which many years of shouting have made second nature with them. For all that, the Irish question as a portentous and vital matter appears to be somewhat played out. One may safely say that in Ireland, at any rate, it has been reduced to an obscurity which allows of its being now spelled with about the smallest cue, in ordinary use among printers. In England it has been allowed to disappear in favor of the Russo-Japanese war, protection, and do we believe. On the whole though, it no doubt harrows the souls of the horde of carpet-baggers which have come to us out of Ireland. This condition of affairs is exceedingly salutary for Ireland itself. Now that the factions and the tumult and the turbulence and the wrangling have died down, or at least an enlarged measure abated, the facts about Ireland are for the first time in history, beginning as it were, to swim into our ken. We are beginning to perceive, for example, that out of the quarrels and bloodshed of the past hundred years Ireland has emerged triumphant. It has been a case of a bankrupt, downtrodden, and dwindling people's fight against a rich and powerful dominant people. And the weaker side has proved clearly that in the long run God is on the side of justice. To all intents and purposes Ireland is at the present moment in full possession of all that she herself has felt it reasonable to demand. She has the franchise, she has land-laws, which are almost socialistic in the benefits they offer to the cultivators of the soil, and she has local self-government. More than all, she has herself begun to recognize that the disposition of England toward her is becoming year by year less arrogant, less implacable, less contemptuous, and less severe. It has been said that Ireland's appeals for reasonable treatment at the hands of England have had to be made by violence of the most brutal and terrorizing kind. She has stood before us with the head of a landlord in one hand and the tail of a cow in the other, and screamed till we gave her what she wanted, and all was in a large measure we have succumbed. And the singular part of it is that in no instance have we had cause, nor do we appear likely to have cause to regret it. Of course that crown and summit of Irish blisses, home rule, has not yet been about saved to her. This I believe is due to the fact that Ireland herself is still making up her mind whether she really wants it. Half Ireland says, give us home rule. The other half says, please don't, and the two parties seem to be getting on very well together by agreeing to differ. This is a true and natural settlement of a problem which as I believe is purely artificial arising out of the exigencies of party and the jealousies of rival demagogues, rather than out of the desires of the people. If Ireland, in her heart of hearts, desired home rule, she would have it within the next couple of years. She has the good sense to know that, however fascinating the theory of home rule may appear, the practice of it for her would be difficult and irksome. It's not altogether disastrous. Both sides are agreed that home rule for Ireland means an immediate spell of civil war for Ireland. The Irish Catholic will tell you this, and the Irish Protestant is equally clear about it. In view of the condition and nature of the country, such a war were a calamity to be staved off at pretty well any cost, even if it were certain. It is by no means certain that the subsequent benefits would be appreciable and lasting. The politicians will tell you that it is possible to have in Ireland what is somewhat pritally called a union of hearts. The union of hearts which I desire as one of them is a union of Irishmen of all classes and of all creeds, from the north to the south, from the east to the west, landlords and tenants, Catholics and Protestants, orange and green, and I look to this union as the surest way of bringing about a national regeneration of our country, which is exceedingly beautiful, but amounts to asking for the moon. Oil and water cannot be made to mix, and in a country where a couple of cardinals and a number of bishops were lately stoned by a rabblement of Protestants, the union of hearts may be reckoned still a great way off. Holy Ireland, and I think it is rather to her credit, will never be brought to do what England and Scotland have managed to do, namely to set the political and material interests in front of the religious and spiritual interests. Catholics and Protestants in Ireland are Catholic and Protestant from head to foot and right through, and you will never induce them to forget it. All the same it is not impossible with the exercise of a little charity and self-restraint for the line to lie down with the Lamb politically, if not religiously, and this is what is happening in Ireland. In other words, the Irish Catholics and Protestants have tacitly agreed that they can live in more or less amity under one government, providing that government is neither an Irish Catholic government nor an Irish Protestant government, but an alien, impartial, and practically secular government. As we have said, the Irish question as a portent and terror to England is disappearing. If indeed it has not already disappeared. For all that, the fact remains that Ireland, in the main, is a distressful country. Thackeray Snooks gives it as his opinion that of all the womb count with that I ever weed of, hang me if Ireland isn't the wombeth. Womb, gay and irrepressible epithet, though it may be, is really, and deep down not the epithet, whereas distressful is. There are people in the world who are born to misfortune, whose lives are touched with melancholy from beginning to end, and who cannot be brought to rejoice even by act of parliament. Ireland's woes may be said to be largely temperamental and still more largely misfortunate. Her very position in the geographical scheme of things is strikingly lonesome and unhappy. Practically, she is the last outpost of Europe and a little one at that. With sheer Atlantic on one side of her and sixty miles of sea between herself and England, it is impossible for her to get rid of a certain feeling of isolation, which is not good for the spirits. The soft rain that is always over her may heighten the green of her meadows, but it keeps her damp and watery, and preter naturally boggy. She has no harbors of the kind that are essential to fishermen, and though some of her ports may be admirable, there is little in the country that calls for the use of them. Thus physically handicapped, Ireland has necessarily produced the people who are in all respects a people to themselves. The religious faculty in them has been highly developed. The commercial faculty might seem to have been left out of their composition. By nature they are a simple, cheerful, unambitious, warm hearted race, and they have suffered accordingly. Sir Francis Drake, or some instrument of his, planted the potato upon them. James I planted the scotch on them. George III gave them a Lord Lieutenant and a secretary. The potato, the scotch, and Dublin Castle have been the three bitter curses which have brought this people to the ghastly social and political passes. All three are ineradicable, but they may be mitigated. This is what Ireland wants. End of Chapter 1. Recording by John Brandon. Chapter 2 of The Wild Irishman by Thomas William Hodgson, T. W. H. Crossland. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by John Brandon. Chapter 2. The Shrelely. As the Yorkshireman is said to sport on his escutcheon a flee, a fly, and a flitch of bacon, so in the popular imagination an Irishman of the real old sort is usually conceived in association with a pig, a pipe, and a Shrelely. Rightly considered one supposes that the Shrelely is a survival of the prehistoric club. In any case it is a weapon of some character, chiefly notable for its handiness in the matter of skull cracking and believed to be the pride and joy of every patty worth his salt. The Shrelely has undoubtedly earned for the Irish a reputation for roguish and heroic delight in battle. Tread on the tail of my coat now is supposed to be forever on Irish lips, with immediate results in the article of broken heads. And when we English wish the use of a metaphor for rouse and scuffles, free fights and so forth, we have a habit of remarking that the affair amounted to a regular Donnybrook. Donnybrook, of course, being a sort of feast of Shrelelys to which all Ireland was want annually to repair. Of the number of Shrelelys in Ireland, at the present moment the blue books give no account. It seems to me doubtful whether there are a thousand in the whole country. One may travel through Ireland for weeks on end and come across nothing of the sort. The only Shrelely I had the pleasure of seeing in the course of a recent lengthy Irish journey was in the hands of a very ill-clad youth, who looked more like a Lancashire cotton operative out of work than a broth of a boy. And the Shrelely in question was of polished black wood without knots. And the top of it had a nickel-silver nub, like a bows cane. The weapon, indeed, reminded me of nothing so much as a salmon and glocksteen silver-headed ebony walking-stick, cut short. The owner proudly assured me that it was his bit of a black thorn and the finest for miles around. It seems more than probable that the Shrelely notion of an Irishman had it one time something in it, while Donnybrook Faire has been suppressed. There could be no getting away from the fact that there once was a Donnybrook and a pretty warm one to boot, says the poet. Who has heir had the luck to see Donnybrook Faire? An Irishman all in his glory is there. With his sprig of Shrelely and shamrock so green, his clothes spick and span new without air a speck, a neat Barcelona tied around his neat neck, he goes to a tent and he spends half a crown. He meets with a friend and for love knocks him down. With his sprig of Shrelely and shamrock so green. And for love knocks him down, is quite in the rail-owled spirit a spectator at the Donnybrook held on the 29th August, 1828, described it as follows, I wrote out again today for the first time to see the Faire at Donnybrook near Dublin, which is a kind of popular festival. Nothing indeed can be more national. The poverty, the dirt, and the wild tumult were as great as the glee and merriment with which the cheapest pleasures were enjoyed. I saw things eaten and drunk with delight, which forced me to turn my head quickly away to remain master of my disgust. Meat and dust, crowd and stench, made it impossible to stay long, but these do not annoy the natives. There were many hundred tents, all ragged, like the people, and adorned with tawdry rags instead of flags. Many contented themselves with a cross on a hoop. One had hoisted a dead and half-futured cat as a sign. The lowest sort of rope-dancers and posture-makers exercised their toilsome vocation on stages of planks, and dressed in shabby finery, dancing and grimacing in the dreadful heat, till they were completely exhausted. A third part of the public lay or rather rolled about drunk. Others ate, screamed, shouted, and fought. The women rode about, sitting two or three upon an ass, pushing their way through the crowd. Smoked with great delight, and coquetted with their sweethearts. It is notable, however, that our eyewitness continues, my reverence for truth compels me to add, that not the slightest trace of English brutality was to be perceived. They were more like French people, though their gaiety was mingled with more humor and more genuine good-nature, both of which are national traits of the Irish, and are always doubled by Poochine. Not only is Donnie Brooke gone, but the whole atmosphere which rendered Donnie Brooke possible appears to have gone with it. The knocking down of a friend for love, or out of sheer gaiety and volatility of soul no longer ranks among the Irishman's accomplishments. If he fights at all, which is seldom, he fights now with clenched teeth, and a fierce hatred at his heart, and usually it is about religion, and has nothing, whatever, to do with either fun or Poochine. In Dublin no more fighting goes on than occurs in the average English city of the same size. In Belfast the fighting is frequent, but it is eminently scotch, and therefore not to be charged against Ireland. Out of Ulster there is scarcely any fighting at all, Poochine or no Poochine. At the same time, in one city, out of Ulster, which I will not name, I was advised by the proprietor of a hotel to prolong my stay because we are expecting riots on Monday. Whether the riots came off or not I do not know, but I saw no accounts of them in the papers. It is, of course, common knowledge that, shallayly, late on one side, the Irishman makes an admirable soldier. In point of fact he is a much better soldier than the Scott, though he has never had the credit for it. The best English generals from Wellington to Lord Roberts have been Irishmen, which is a paradox, not a bull. The Irish never run away. In our late wars, certain non-Irish regiments, which were neither English nor Welsh, did run away. It is significant that Mr. Kipling's soldiers, in Soldiers Three, for example, are Irish, Cockney, and Yorkshire. And that the Irishman is set down for the smartest man. I have seen it remarked, and I believe it can be justified, out of the military histories, that while the Irish and English regiments have usually done the rough and tumble, hand-to-hand fighting, in our most famous engagements, the gentlemen with the bare knees have had the good fortune to be sent in at the tail end of the trouble, merely to execute a little ornamental sweeping up. To the eye of officers and women, nothing looks nicer than kilts and spats. To disarrange them were a pity. For whenever possible, we should hold them in reserve. On the parade ground and in processions the same thing applies. The plaudits of the crowd being invariably forthcoming for the bunny bare-legged laddies, newly enlisted may-hap, out of Glasgow and Dumfries, while seasoned Irish warriors go past without a hand-clap. But it is the kilts that do it. There may be nothing in this. And anyway, I do not suppose that the Irish care two-pence. But the points for us to remember, while we are on this part of our subjects are, that the shirleyly is an effete weapon, that in Irish differences the principle of a word and a blow does not prevail, and that the Irish soldier is very competent and very courageous. Chapter 3 of the Wild Irishman by Thomas William Hodgson, T.W.H. Crossland. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by John Brandon. Chapter 3. LARNE LARNE has come to mean a certain adroitness and winningness of speech supposed to be peculiar to the Irish. If an Irishman opens his mouth, the Englishman Scotch insists on assuming that they are being treated to Blarney. The persons who affect Messer's cook's tours hang on to the words of every Irishman they meet, particularly if he be a Jarvie, and wait lovingly, and with baited breath for the same phenomenon. There are no snakes in Ireland, and sad to relate there is very little Blarney. Broadly speaking the people seem too poverty-stricken and too apathetic for talk of any kind, much less for the sprightly locustity and skillfulness of retort which we call Blarney. The Irish Jarvie, who is commonly believed to be an adept in the art, is just as much a disappointment as the London cabbie. Even in the noble city of Dublin, you find as a rule that you are being driven by a dull, flee-bitten, orter-full person who has really not two words to say for himself, that he is a daring and reckless driver I am quite willing to admit, that he has a passion for stout and whiskey-goes without saying, but that he is a wit or a humorist or a weedling talker, or in any sense gifted above ordinary hack-drivers I deny. In the smaller centres of population and in the country districts he is even duller and more flee-bitten and more taciturn. When he tries to charge you treble fare, which is his usual practice, he does it with a snap and gracelessly. As a porter out of local monuments he lacks both salt and information. He has no gift for entertainment, and he drinks sullenly and with a careful eye on the clock. As for the Irish waiters, rooms, handymen, railway porters, and kindred creatures of whose powers of humorous persuasion and repartee so much has been written, I have no hesitation in pronouncing them to be a sad, uncertain, curt, fiddle-faced company, with scarcely a smile or the materials for a smile among them. Their conversation is monosyllabic. Their manner barely civil, their apprehensions slow, and their habits slack and perfunctory. And they are about as blarney-fied as the Trafalgar Square lions. Of the peasantry I could only say that cheerfulness, whether of notion or word, is not nowadays their strong point. They have a great way of saying your honour to you if you're a man, and your leadership's honour if you are a woman. But after that the amount of blarney to be got out of them is infinitesimal, grinding poverty, short commons, a solitary life on some dreary mountainside, and a fine view of the workhouse. Do not tend to sharpen the Irish tongue any more than they sharpen the Irish wit. On the whole, therefore, I am inclined to think that nearly all a blarney that should be in Ireland has for some reason or other taken unto itself wings and flown away. The people are no longer racy of the soil, even the gentry, who once had the credit of being roguish and devil-may-care to a fault, are become sad and somber and flat of speech. The milk of humankindness in the Irish blood appears in short to have gone sour, and in place of the old disposition of humour, we have a tendency to cynicism and vituperative remark. And when an Irishman turns cynic or vituperator, he takes a wonderful deal of beating as witnessed the utterances in parliament and elsewhere of that choice body of gentlemen known as the Irish party, or the proceedings of the Dublin Corporation, or the lucubrations of the Irish press. A singular exhibition of this particular Irish weakness has quite lately been offered us by no less a person than Mr. Samuel M. Hussie, who I believe rather prides himself on having been described as the best abused man in Ireland. Of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Hussie writes as follows, If Napoleon was the scourge of Europe, Mr. Gladstone was the most malevolent imp of mischief that ever ruined any one country. I heard him introduce the motion, the land act of 1881 in the House of Commons, and his speech was a truly marvellous feat of oratory. He was interrupted on all sides of the house, and in his speech of nearly five hours in length, never once lost the threat of his discourse. As far as I could judge, he never even by accident let slip one word of truth. To do them justice the Irish members gave such an exhibition of Blaggardism as has no parallel on earth, though it earned but the mildest rebuke from their obsequious ally, Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone considered that if you gave a scoundrel a vote, it made him a philanthropist, whereas events proved it made him an eager accessory of murder, outrage, and every other crime. It is only fair to Mr. Hussie to say that he himself has received as good as he gives. For example, an Irish demagogue once treated him to the following. Sam Hussie is a vulture with a broken beak, and he laid his voracious talents on the conscience of the voters. Booze! The ugly scowl of Sam Hussie came down upon them. He wanted to try the influence of his dark nature on the poor people. Groans! Where was the legitimate influence of such a man? Was it in the white terror he diffused? Was it not the espionage, the network of spies with which he surrounded his lands? He denied that a man who managed property had for that reason a shadow of a shade of influence to justify him in asking a tenant for his vote, what had they to thank him for? A voice? Rack-rents! They knew the man from his boyhood, from his ga-soon-hood. He knew him when he began with a co-op of sheep at his property in the world, laughter, long before he got God's mark on him. It was not the man's fault but his misfortune, that he got no education, laughter. He had in that power school masters who could teach him grammar for the next ten years. The man was in fact a Uriah heap among Kerry landlords. Cheers! Here surely is Blarney with a vengeance. Among a people which was otherwise than glib of expression, such writing in such oratory would be difficult to evolve, when presumably cultivated men. For Mr. Hussey's assailant, in this instance, was a priest, allow themselves to indulge in such childish abjugation. What wonder is it that the commonality should be found to have lost their sense, in what is proper to decent speech and reasonable argument? The demagogues of Ireland have indubitably gone a great way toward ruining the native taste and innate good breeding of the Irish people. Like the hapenny pavers of England, they have made their fortunes and their power by the degradation of the masses. It is possible that the poverty of the country left them absolutely without other weapons, wherewith to fight the haughty national enemy, England. It is certain that without these demagogues and without their raging and blistering words and the foul and brutal actions which frequently followed them, landlord-ism in Ireland would never have been scotched. As it is, the landlord has been put in his place, and the chances of the natural airs of the soil have been greatly enhanced. No drastic revolution of this kind can be brought about without loss even to the winning side. And in my opinion, not the least of the losses of the winning side in this matter has been the transformation of Blarney into flatness and combination. Under the heels of the tyrant the Irish people retain their faculty for mirth and mirthful speech. The exhortations of the demagogue and the agitator have brought them freedom, opportunity, and a distinct abatement of spirits. As the world goes, one is now compelled to reckon Ireland in the same category that one reckons those innocuous islets named man and white. There is no more devil in the Isle of Dogs than all Ireland is for the moment in a position to show. It is not Ireland's fault, and it is not England's fault. It is the horrible fault of the nature of things. Whatever has happened in the past has happened because nothing better nor worse could in the nature of things have happened. What will happen in the future remains to be seen. It may be peace and the rehabilitation of kindly, lively, and interesting people. It may be peace and the dullest sorts of apathy and decay. In any case, it will be peace. The Times, which after this Saturday review is admittedly the least consistent journal published on this footstool, has frequently been reproved over the mouth for remarking years ago that in a short time a Catholic Kelt will be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan. This, in effect, was prophecy, though it is a hundred to one that the Times did not know it. If the resilient and recuperative powers of the Irish people have not been destroyed, there is hope for the Irish people in Ireland. If those powers have been destroyed, there is no hope for the Irish people in Ireland. Larny, even of the recuperative order, will go entirely out, and the low scotch will come entirely in. I will do the low scotch the credit of saying that if they had their way and no Irish Catholics to contend with, they could make Ireland a highly successful business proposition inside a quarter of a century. Whether they will ever get the chance is on the knees of the gods. For my own part, and this is not Larny, I hope sincerely that they never will. Chapter 4 Whiskey The universe as we know it abounds in enigmas, and perhaps the most suspendous enigma of all of them is called whisky. In Scotland, whisky is the universal icor and panacea. In Ireland, a kind of whisky, which is unquestionably whisky but not scotch, stands in the same friendly relation to the people. In England we drink both kinds, lying thus between the devil and the deep sea. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the basers sorts of whisky are scotch, and that the primal, more edifying, and more inspiring sorts, if we only knew it, are Irish. He who drinks beer thinks beer. He who drinks whisky thinks whisky. He who drinks scotch whisky becomes as the scotch people, who as all men know are a hectoring, swaggering, dull-witted, bandy-legged, lanticrade folk. He who drinks Irish whisky becomes as the Irish, who should be nimble and neat and vivacious, and thriftless and careless, and lavish and decent, and otherwise gracious. The wise man, of course, will let both varieties pass by him, accepting that he take them in thimblefuls, and then only in the shape of nightcaps. Unless the United Kingdom alliance misconstrues what I have now said, let me here say roundly and flatly, and out of a good heart, a plague on both your whiskies. The scotch, it is true, is better to your taste, but the Irish has the merit of being better to your ethical or nobler parts. The effect of Irish whisky upon Ireland is a matter that might fittingly form the subject of six or eight stout volumes, bound in calf, and prefaced by the life of Father Matthew. The appealing and startling beauty of Irish whisky as a potable spirit appears to lie in the fact that it has never done Ireland any harm. The number of whisky-sodden persons in Scotland, and the number of whisky-sodden persons in Ireland, stand in the ratio of ten to one. In Scotland the red nose and the pimply face abound. Outside that fearsome area known as the diamond, there is scarcely a red nose or a pimply face in all Ireland. All the best scotch whisky is produced in legitimate distilleries, and all the best Irish whisky, with due respect, of course, to Donville Jameson at Hock Janus comes out of little places which are unbeknownst to the King's officers of excise. This, however, is merely extraordinary, paradoxical, and inexplicable, and has nothing whatever to do with ethnology. But to return to the point, whisky in Scotland is a religion, an institution, a tradition, and a national reproach. Whisky in Ireland, on the other hand, is an accomplishment, an ornament, a mellowness, a kindness, a simplicity, and a joy forever. The true Irish people drink it wisely as the gall takes his wine. When you see a number of drunken persons in Ireland, you may safely assume that they are orange men and have scotch descent. The Irish of Ireland do not get drunk, which means that they neither roister in bars nor soak alcoholically at home. According to Mr. Hussie, Irish whisky is vitally adulterated, both by the publican and in some of the factories. In support of his statement, he tells the following story. On one occasion, a Kilorgelin publican was in jail, and his father asked for an interview because he wanted the recipe for manufacturing the special whisky for Puck Fair. It has been a constant practice to prepare this blend, but the whisky does not keep many days, as may be gathered from the recipe, which the prisoner without hesitation dictated to his parent. A gallon of fresh fiery whisky, a pint of rum, a pint of methylated spirit, two ounces of corrosive sublimate, and three gallons of water, which is to suggest that the Irish have no palates, and that like the gentlemen who ate flight papers in mistake for oat cake, they are poison-proof. Frankly, I should be disposed to take Mr. Hussie's recipe with great reserve. It is amusing, doubtless, but a chemist would shake his head over it. Practically the only undesirable drinking, which goes on in Ireland proper, is done at wakes. But even Mr. Hussie admits that wakes are on the decline and not by any means the occasions for overindulgence, which they once were. It is all very well to visit a country town and single out half a dozen notorious drunkards with the view of proving that the Irish people are drunken people. I say that the Irish people in the lump are a sober people, though they may not be teetotalers. I will go further and admit that they have a wonderful appreciation for the wine of the country and that at times some of them even get hearty. But this is not to say that drink rages in Ireland as it rages in Scotland, or for that matter as it rages in the poorer quarters of our English cities. And I believe further that taking the whisky of Ireland all round, it is a much sounder and less sophisticated spirit than the bulk of the whisky consumed in Scotland and England. Mr. Hussie assures us that the increase of lunacy in Ireland has been pronounced by the committee which sat on the question in Dublin to be mainly due not only to excessive drinking, but to the assimilation of adulterated spirits. With all respect to the conclusions of this committee, I do not think that those conclusions are borne out by the facts. Lunacy in Ireland is the direct outcome of the most unthinkable poverty and squalor of the greater part of the population. When you couple with poverty, want of occupation, a solitary life, and an innervating climate, not to mention the melancholy brooding propensities of the Irish peasant, it is no wonder that lunacy claims many victims. To allege that because a lunatic has been in the habit of consuming a considerable quantity of puchine, his lunacy is necessarily due to puchine, seems to me to be begging the question. If you could alleviate the poverty and inaction to which the Irish peasant is condemned from the day of his birth to the day of his death, you would have gone a long way toward eliminating lunacy from Ireland, and at the same time I believe you would find that you had not seriously reduced the consumption of whisky. The fact being that the consumption per head of the population is reasonable. In this as in many other respects, Ireland has been grossly misrepresented, both by serious and humorous writers. The humorous writers indeed have been the graver offenders. Many of them seem incapable of conceiving the Irish character in any terms of those of hilarious and flagrant alcoholism. It is a profound mistake, and we shall be helped materially in our endeavors to comprehend and placate our unfortunate sister kingdom if we dismiss forthwith from our minds the idea that she is utterly and perceptibly given over to inordinate drinking. End of Chapter 4 Recording by John Brandon Chapter 5 of The Wild Irishman by Thomas William Hodgson T. W. H. Crossland. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by John Brandon. Chapter 5 The Patriot Ireland has produced more patriots than any other country under the sun. The names of them are Legion, and from Wolf Tone, down to Dr. Tanner they have all been men of reasonable parts. O'Connell, Emmett, Butt, and Parnell shine out perhaps as the greatest of them. The smaller fry do not require enumeration. But if I mistake not, while it is the fashion to flatter every Irishman who has done anything at all for Ireland with the general title of Patriot, it is only within comparatively recent times that the authentic Patriot has come into being. The fact that in England people are unkind enough to call him an agitator is of small consequence. The Patriot is singularly and peculiarly Irish. There is nothing like him in England, and there never will be anything like him, for he comes like water and like wind he goes. He begins anywhere. He may be a butcher, a publican, a schoolmaster, or a farmer. He attains a seat in the House of Commons, and a certain prominence in the press, and he ends nowhere. Irish editors worship him for a season. Then they wax critical of him. Then they forget him altogether. Mr. Timothy Healy is a good type of the Patriot at his best. He has accomplished great things for Ireland, and achieved for himself a reputation in Parliament for a sort of savage brilliance. But there are not a dozen men in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales today who care two pence where he is, or could tell you what becomes of him when Parliament is not sitting. He will end obscurely, in as much as it is the fate of Irish Patriots so to end, as the Chief of the Patriots of the less glorious type who, however, succeed in making the best of both countries, we may instance Mr. T. P. O'Connor. Mr. O'Connor is an Irishman and a nationalist, but he has shaken the dust of Ireland from his feet, and he sits for the Scotland Division of Liverpool, and has done himself rather well as a promoter of heterogeneous newspapers in London. With Mr. O'Connor, however, we shall deal fully elsewhere. Only for the sake of symmetry do not let us forget that he is a Patriot of the finest water. The vital defect in the character of the Irish Patriot, looking at him squarely, is that in recent times at any rate he has never been a statesman. A Patriot, with the proper statesmanlike qualities might, it is true, have been altogether swamped by the frothy eloquence and wild demands of the main body of Patriots. But such a one, if the Irish could only have managed to find him and keep him going, whether in the House of Commons or on English platforms, would in the long run have made a vast difference to her interests. It may be argued that Ireland did actually find a statesman in Mr. Gladstone. On the other hand, it is abundantly evident that however sincere and admirable Mr. Gladstone's proposals for the betterment of the country may have been, they were not based on anything like an exact, or for that matter even a working knowledge of its necessities and requirements. As for Mr. Parnell, it is no disrespect to him to say of him in full view of his amazing career that he was not a statesman, even in a small way. His aloofness, haughtiness, and chilliness of temper precluded him from a really effective part, or lot in the faction which he led, and ruled with a rod of iron, and for himself he had not sufficient spirits and imagination to carve out an independent and statesman-like policy. Mr. Parnell made a great name and no little dust in the world, yet the verdict of history upon him will be that he was neither an O'Connell nor an Isaac Butt, and that he failed to go anything like so far as might have been expected of him. For the rest of the Patriots, the remnant as it were of the National Party, they do not matter, and they know it. In the House of Commons they are absolutely without other than adventitious power. The English Party system happened to afford them certain mechanical advantages of which they are never tired of boasting. Their sarcasm and humours and occasional displays of temper bring them from time to time a passing notoriety. But taking them as a body they are inept, irresponsible, feeble, and negligible, constituting indeed a standing monument to the undesirable vagaries which might be looked for in the event of their being granted that much desired little place of their own on College Green. In fine the Irish Patriot of our times will not wash. He means well by his country, and well enough by himself, but he has no balance, and is entirely blind to the falsehood of extremes. It is curious to note how easily Ireland is satisfied. In pretty well all matters that concern her closely, her standard of requirement is barely middling. She knows how to be grateful to the nearest non-entities, and she can be still reverence and undying fame upon persons who are little removed from mediocrity. The modern Patriot has never risen above the foothills, yet for Ireland he stands upon the pinnacle, and they say Hosanna to him. It is a sign of the times, however, that Aaron is beginning to be alive to the fact that in the main the Patriot is just one of those persons with whom you can very well afford to dispense. Vaulting ambition hath rather overleaped itself in the matter of these gentry, and their posturings and screamings and clenchings of the fist are no longer received with altogether unanimous applause. That there is reason in all things is a simple lesson which Patriots, who are not wholly careless of their future, will do well to learn. Their well-worn parrot cries of tyranny, oppression, cowardice, robbery, murder, and so forth, are become just a trifle stale, flat, and unprofitable. Irishmen are weary of shrieks. They desire a trifle of sobriety and good sense. William Hodgson, T. W. H. Crossland. In Matters, Irish, it is quite usual to talk of aiming at the manifestly impossible. If we could get rid of the priests, some say, Ireland would be a happy country, but nobody suggests how it is to be done, because everybody knows full well that it cannot be done, and nobody pretends to be quite sure that benefits would result if it were done. For myself, I believe that one of the most salutary things that could be done for Ireland at the present moment would be to get rid of the orange men. Though they are, of course, a much older organization, they occupy in Ireland pretty much the same position as the passive resisters occupy in this country. In other words, while they proclaim themselves to be the friends of liberty, they are in reality nothing more nor less than the friends of intolerance and tyranny. A grand orange demonstration will be held in Dunny Gaul on Tuesday, 12th July, 1898. Who fears to speak of Derry, Ogrum, and the Boine? Papus, stand aside. We conquered you before, and can do so again. Our motto still is, down with home rule, Harawth or King William, and to hell with the Pope. This is a sample orange proclamation quoted by Mr. M. J. F. McCarthy in five years in Ireland. Now, 75% of the population of Ireland are Roman Catholics. What is more, they are Roman Catholics of the devoutest and most devoted type. Probably the orange men do not number 10% of the population, yet they are allowed to insult the head of the Roman church in the grossest manner with absolute impunity. If any secret society or other body in Ireland were to post a notice in Dunny Gaul tomorrow announcing a grand national demonstration and winding up with some ejaculatory remark as to hell with Mr. Balfour, there would be arrests and terms of imprisonment and howls from every corner of England. It goes without saying that the Pope is not Mr. Balfour, and when his holiness is wished to hell, nobody is really a penny the worse. But can it be claimed for a moment that there is either justice or reason in allowing such insults to be placarded in the midst of a Catholic population? Nobody above the level of a Scotch Presbyterian would attempt to justify anything of the kind. It may be that when the orange lodges were founded, they had a use and were necessary for the protection of the Protestant religion against the wiles of Roman Catholicism. At the present moment they serve no purpose whatever that is not essentially evil. In point of fact they are organized centres for the encouragement of Biblioth sentiment and the open flaunting of the power of an ill-conditioned minority over a decent and fairly tolerant majority. The Protestant religion in Ireland must be in a distinctly parlous condition if it requires any such backing or any such protection. The fact is that nothing of the sort is necessary, or believed to be necessary, even by the more bigoted Irish Protestants. That being so, orangeism would seem to be ripe for extirpation. If the English government were as secular as it is commonly held to be, the orange lodges would have short shrift. It is their supposed connection with religious liberty which shields them from suppression. Yet every Irishman, Protestant or Catholic, knows well that the religious element in orangeism is little more than pure farce. The entire orange forces of Ireland could not muster a couple of saints, lay or clerical, to save their lives. At the present time the orange faction is literally powerless to do anything but create disturbances which are in effect street rouse of the most vulgar and ill-considered nature. The stoning of cardinals belongs properly to the same order of sport as the baiting of Jews. Neither pastime would be tolerated for a moment in England. Why the Northern Irish should be indulged passes comprehension. The majority in Ireland is green and Catholic, as opposed to a tiny minority of the orange and Protestant. The majority has an admitted right to its way in England. Why not in Ireland? Much has been said as to the sinfulness and wickedness of Mr Gladstone in disestablishing the Irish Church. I am not sure that even the Catholics are quite convinced that Mr Gladstone's action was wise, but one thing is certain, namely, that the disestablishment of the Irish Church was eminently just having regard to the relative position of religious parties in the country. The suppression of the orange lodges, or at any rate the penalization of orange demonstrations, ought to have followed a matter of course. There will never be real peace nor content in Ireland till orangeism is deprived of its present scandalous powers of annoyance, disturbance, and tyranny. Toleration on both sides, Catholic and Protestant, is the only hope for a united Ireland, or for an Ireland that is to work out its own social and political salvation. And you cannot have tolerance where you have an organization of chartered reactionaries who, in spite of their alleged religious purpose, are little removed, whether in temper or intention, from the common hooligans of London. The Irish Catholic Church, which after all possesses some say over its adherence, has during late years done all that lies in its power to prevent collisions between Catholics and Orange men. It avoids as far as is possible the occasions of such collision. It is careful neither to provoke nor challenge, and in practice it literally turns the other cheek. The Irish Protestant Church is equally anxious for peace, and equally assiduous in its efforts to secure it. Yet orangeism flaunts itself at large and without let or hindrance. It furnishes forth riots o' Monday, at its own sweet will, and hoots, and mobs, and waves crimson handkerchiefs, and throws stones and breaks windows and heads to its heart's content. There is really nobody to say it nay, authority stands by and winks. For is it not the great principle of Protestantism that is being protected? And are not these same Orange men vigorous and violent anti-home rulers? Herein indeed you have the true inwardness of the modern English attitude toward King William's men. The domestic quietude of Ireland and the religious freedom of two-thirds of her population can not be of the remotest consequence compared with the maintenance of the union. That Ireland no longer seeks homebrew does not matter. Orangeism has severed the unionists passing well in the day that is just past, let it reap its reward in the shape of leave and license. It deserves well of England. Who shall raise a finger against it? And moreover, it is Scotch and the Scotch of the backbone of Ireland, as of England, manners and morals, and all other decent things on one side. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, to attempt to rid Ireland of Orange men, or to attempt the impossible, but to deprive Orangeism of English approval and countenance is possible. Break up the lodges, bring to bear on the suppression of Orange demonstrations and Orange disturbances one tithe of the forces you brought to bear against Irish nationalism, and you will have gone a great way toward removing the last obstacles to the peace and contentment of the Irish people as a body. CHAPTER VII THE LOW SCOTCH I have no desire to offer, in the present pages, a rehash of a former work of mine, which is said to have provoked the Scotch to the point of laughter. What I do desire to assert that in my humble opinion it is the Scotch, or alien, population of Ireland, which has been at the root of Ireland's principal troubles throughout the past century. Ulster may be a fine kingdom, the wealthiest, most industrious, and the wisest and happiest in the country, if you like. Yet it is Ulster that bars the way in all matters that make for the real good of Ireland. Every proper Irishman knows this, and Ulster men will make no pains to deny it. Rather, are they disposed to glory in it, and to brag about it. Ireland, they will tell you, is their country. It is they who have made it. They who have saved it. They who have enriched, beautified, and adorned it. They point to the linen industry, and to the shipbuilding industry. They crack about Belfast, and port it down, and about eminent Ulster men in every walk of life. There would be no Ireland at all, if it were not for themselves. They rule Ireland. What Ireland wants, she may have, if it pleases Ulster. What Ireland does not want, she must have, if Ulster so much as not. That, at any rate, is the view of Ulster, the view of the thrifty, jousts, Scotch bodies whose fathers got gifts of other people's lands, from James the First of England, and Sixth of Scotland, and whose sons go up and down, and to and fro upon the earth, calling themselves Irishmen of Scotch descent. There are no Irishmen of Scotch descent. And Ulster men are not Irishmen, unless their descents be Irish. Failing this, they are simply interlopers. Or, at best, colonists and plantation men, and they had best put the fact in their pipes and smoke it. Nobody can deny that it was a bad day for Ireland, when they came grabbing and grubbing to her shores, just as it was a bad day for England, when she took up with them. They got Ulster for nothing, and they have kept it for that same. They have lived and waxed fat on Irish plunder, and the whole force of English legislation has been directed toward maintaining them in their place, fostering their projects, pampering and propitiating them, and protecting them against the wicked, degraded, unreasonable Irish outside. Nor have they been content to confine their greedy attention to their own proper kingdom, which is not theirs. Where the carcass is, there will the vulture be, and where there is a soft job or obvious pickings, there you will find a Scotchman. So that throughout Ireland, Scotchman have been scattered wherever the government could find a place for one. There is scarcely an office, sub-office, or sub-deputy office worth having in all Ireland, which has not been made the perquisite of a Protestant Scotchman. Even the congested district's board employs Scotch factors, and Tom's almanac is little more than a catalog of Scotch patronymics, and the pride and insolence and unfairness of them. From a booklet called The Scot in Ulster, written by a Scotchman and published, if you please, by Blackwoods of Edinburgh, I take the following. Their English and Scotch origin seems to me, to give to the men of Ulster, an unalienable right to protest, as far as they are concerned against the policy of separation from Great Britain, to which the Irish, with the genius for nicknames which they possess, at present give the name of home rule. Could sophistry, craft, subtlety, disingenuousness, or the Scotch genius for cunning misrepresentation go further? To say that when the Irish people have said home rule, they meant separation, is to promulgate a deliberate and wily untruth. The Irish people proper invariably mean what they say. No more and no less. Home rule never meant more nor less to the Irish than a parliament on College Green. It was the Scotch and the Scotch alone who set up the cry of separation for a bugbear and a boogie wherewith to frighten the timorous English ruler into stubborn acquiescence in the Scotch view of Irish affairs. Yet here we have a Scotchman assuring us in cold print that home rule is merely an Irish nickname for separation. I note with considerable satisfaction, however, that a Scotchman will, the author of the Scotch in Ulster, proceeds religiously to give away the whole Scotch-Irish question. For centuries, says he, the Scotch has been want to wander forth over Europe in search of adventure. The Italic is ours. As a rule he turned his steps where fighting was to be had, and the pay for killing was reasonably good. Again the Italics are ours. These Scots who have flocked from Leith or Creole or Berwick to seek fortune in peace or war on the continent of Europe were mostly the young and adventurous, for whom the old home life had become too narrow. They took with them little, save their own stout hearts and their national long heads. These two are our Italics. The time arrived at last, however, when war with England ceased. And internal strife became less bloody, and Scotland began to be too small for her rapidly growing population. For in those days food did not necessarily come where there were mouths to consume it. Italics of our own, which famine, stricken Ireland may fittingly ponder. Then the Scots drew to the race from which they sprung, for Norman and Saxon and Dane are, we, think of it. Began to go forth, like the northern hordes and days of yore, the women and the children along with the breadwinners, and crossed the seas and settled in new lands, and were fruitful and multiplied and replenished the earth, until the globe is circled round with colonies, which are of our blood, and which love and cherish the old land of the mountain and the flood. Toot toot. And now, Marcus, it was in the beginning of the seventeenth century when the first of these swarms crossed the narrowest of the seas, which surrounds Scotland. It went out from the airshire and Galloway ports, and settled in the north of Ireland. The numbers which went were large. They left Scotland at a time when she was deeply moved by the Great Puritan Revival. They took with them their Scottish character and their Scottish Calvinism. Clearly they had both hands full. They founded the Scottish colony in Ulster. Thus it comes to pass that the foundation of Ulster society is Scottish. It is the solid granite on which it rests, Glory B. The history of this Scottish colony seems worth telling, for it is a story of which any Scotsman at home or abroad may be proud. Where is my crimson handkerchief? Its early history is quaint and interesting, are italics. There is much suffering and oppression in the story of the succeeding years, are italics. But there are flashes of brightness to relieve the gloom. The men which this race of Scotsman has produced are worthy of the parent's stock. The contribution which this branch of the Scottish nation has made to the progress of civilization proves that it has not forgotten the old ideals. The portion of Ireland, which these Scotsman hold, is so prosperous and contented that it permits our statesman to forget that it is part of that most distressed country. I venture to thank Heaven and St. Patrick that the statements we have last italicized and the word we have put in capital letters embody the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Examine them, O sons of Aaron, and take heed that you are the people, and that the Scots are but the sons of Belisle and Asteroth. What has Holy Ireland to do with these vapours, these swaggerings, these smightings of righteous breasts? Who be the grubby, grimy, gallowy and grasping governmental hucksters that so by implication and innuendo condemn you the proper and legitimate owners of Ulster? Ask of the winds which far around is true Scotsman and the devil on the fair places of the earth. You are innocent to put up with it. You fought the landlords and beat them hollow. We conquered you before, and can do so again. Be done with this scotch obsession. Good can come out of Ireland and Irishman, as well as out of Ulster and Scotsman. Lo, that green island is yours, not theirs. Seven tenths of it are in your hands to do with, as you will. There is not perhaps another country on the face of the globe where more good solid work is waiting to be done, where greater capacities lie dormant, yet we're trifling of all kinds so abounds. That is the verdict of an Irishman and an Irish Catholic upon you. In sober truth you groan, as England groans, under the scotch superstition. Nobody can be prosperous in Ireland, save Scotsman. Nobody can manufacture but Scotsman. Nobody can farm but Scotsman. The view is entirely false. Encourage it no longer. Remember who you are, and make an end of trifling. 8. Priestcraft Are there too many priests in Ireland? Yes. Is Dublin black with them? Yes. Do they appear to be as frequent on the countryside as crows? Yes. Are they extorting from the Irish people money which is sorely needed for secular purposes? Yes. Here you have four pertinent questions which invariably crop up whenever Ireland is discussed. Together with the average answers to them. It is the priests. Cry both well and ill-informed. According to the latest critic, who it seems once occupied, the somewhat superfluous position of literary editor of the Daily Mail, one of the heaviest drags upon the life of Ireland, is the religious vocation. The monasteries and nunneries prosper and increase, choking and interfering with the circulation of labour and of industry in the country. Also, it is my profound conviction that a large proportion of the present misery in Ireland is not only bound up with what is actually a result of the country's religion. Also, the houses of the people are so indecently poor and small. The houses of the church are so indecently rich and large. Out of the dirt and decay they rise, proud and ugly and substantial, as though to inform the world that at least one thing is not dying and despondent, but keeps its loins girded and its lamps trimmed. This roughly is the indictment. Appended are some of the figures upon which it is based. Mr. Michael McCarthy, himself a Catholic, says, a cardinal, three archbishops, 25 bishops, two mitered abbots, and 2,722 secular priests, together with a host of regular priests, of all the different orders, such as Jesuits, Franciscans, Vincentians, Holy Ghost, Carmelites, Passionists, Augustinians, Mary Immaculate, Dominicans, Cistercians, Marists, Redemptorists, and so forth, all of whom flourish in Ireland, such as the force which constitutes the formidable clerical army of the Catholic Church in Ireland. And its auxiliary forces are the numerous orders of nuns, Christian brothers, lay brothers attached to the regular orders, and so forth, together with the great body of Catholic national teachers, male and female, who are under the control of the priests, and teach catechism in the churches, the parish priests as managers of the parochial national schools, having the power of dismissing the teachers. May it not be said of this great organization, adds Mr. McCarthy, that it is on a scale such as few nations would be able and willing to afford. To dispose of the indictment first, we may quote a little further from the author of it. He writes so far as they are individually concerned. They, the priests, are in many cases the true friends of the people. They help them in their affairs, settle their disputes, claim for them their rights, comfort them in their sorrows, admonish, encourage, cherish, and watch over them. This is at the best. At the worst they are hard and cruel, selfish and unjust, overeating and overdrinking, a grotesque and monstrous company. But these are the minority, and on the whole the priests perform the duties of a dreary life, as well as could be expected of a narrow and half-educated class of men. Now if this means anything at all, it means that the person responsible for it believes that the Catholic priesthood of Ireland is socially useful and necessary. The minority of its members are hard and cruel, selfish and unjust, which is true of the minority of other priesthoods besides the Irish. But the majority are the true friends of the people, helping them in their affairs, settling their disputes, claiming for them their rights, comforting them in their sorrows, admonishing, encouraging, cherishing, and watching over them. How the majority manages to accomplish so much, if it is composed of a narrow, half-educated class of men, passes comprehension. But we have the fact that it manages it, which is satisfactory. Further, our friend omits in the plentitude of his deprecation to mention that the religious vocation in Ireland is by no means the softest, easiest, and rosiest of vocations. Amounting, indeed, to a species of spiritual and physical servitude of the severest kind, and that the religious orders, so far as they may be represented in monasteries and nunneries, are self-supporting, subsisting austerely on the labor of their own hands, and devoting themselves to the most arduous, charitable, and educational work without fee or reward. And as to indecently rich houses of the church, such an epithet, as applied to the Catholic churches of Ireland, is quite preposterous. There is no indecently rich Catholic church in all Ireland. That there are Protestant churches with incomes amounting to a comfortable number of hundreds per annum, and not a half a dozen souls in the way of a bona fide congregation may be granted, but the Catholic church, with as little as a hundred pounds a year and no congregation, does not exist. Neither can it be maintained that the Irish Catholic churches are indecently rich in the matters of architecture or adornment. The long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, gorgeous windows, splendid altars and vessels, or other elaborate fitments, being the exception and not the rule, indeed our author himself complains that the ugliness of the churches in Ireland is revolting to the healthy sense, and that the decorations which enshrine the mysteries of the mass are cheap and hideous, so that on his own showing indecently rich somehow fails to fit in. Now for the figures. The population of Ireland at the last census was roughly four million five hundred thousand, and the population of England and Wales thirty-two million five hundred thousand. In Ireland there are three archbishops and twenty-five bishops without reckoning Episcopalians. In England and Wales there are two archbishops, thirty-three bishops, eight assistant bishops, and twenty-seven bishops suffragan. Without reckoning one Roman Catholic archbishop and fifteen bishops, and the chiefs of the Wesleyan Methodist, Methodist New Connection, Primitive Methodist, Baptist Congregational, Free Church, Salvation Army, Church Army, Calvinistic, Unitarian, Catholic, Apostolic, and a host of other bodies. In the matter of hierarchy therefore, Ireland is not exactly overburdened, even if it be admitted that she should take her pattern from England. Then as against Ireland's two thousand seven hundred twenty-two secular priests, England boasts the amazing total of twenty-three thousand benefits and unbenefits clergy, plus from seven thousand to ten thousand nonconformist ministers and twenty thousand Salvation Army officers. So that at a moderate computation, while there is one priest or minister of religion to every five hundred of the population in England, there is only one priest to every eight hundred of the population of Ireland. The ratios indicated may not be exact, but they are based on Whitaker and pretty near the mark. Taken another way the position amounts to this. In an English townlet of from three thousand to four thousand population, you will find as a rule a couple of vicars, three or four curates, a Wesleyan minister, a Baptist minister, a Congregational minister, a Catholic priest, and a couple of Salvationists. In an Irish townlet of the same size, you have probably six Catholic priests and a solitary Episcopalian. Dreadful is it not? Being mainly of one sort, as it were, the priests of Ireland appear to be much thicker on the ground than the clergy and ministers of England, but it is nothing more nor less than an optical illusion, one of those many illusions upon which judgments about Ireland are usually formed. As to places of worship, it has been charged against the Irish church that she builds too much. The traveller walking or driving across the wastes of that empty land, says the author previously quoted, will nearly always find the first thing to break the monotony of the horizon is a spire or tower, and when he arrives at the desolate little huddle of cabins or cottages that makes a town, he will find, dominating and shadowing it, the Catholic chapel. Sometimes indeed, the buildings are poor and rough, but these are becoming fewer and fewer, and are now gradually, even in the poorest districts, being replaced by structures strangely out of keeping with the ruinous poverty around them. The last few years have seen in Ireland great activity in the building of these chapels, the very slight increase, which has taken place in the standard of living, has made the movement possible. Assuming this to be a just statement of the case, is it not equally true of our own England, as not the building of churches, chapels, and general places of worship, proceeded as merrily in the poorer districts of the larger English towns during the past decade, as ever it did in Ireland? Where can you turn in England without seeing a spire? Where is the townlet or suburb or slum that has not got its brand new red brick Anglican church, or its ruddy stone-fronted Bethesda, or its casillated prison-like salvation barracks? Furthermore, the English temples are seldom half-full. You have to provide a sort of religious variety entertainment with services of song, magic lanterns, sermons, brass bands, and the like to get the people in at all, whereas the churches of Ireland are full to offer flowing, and the congregations do not require the lure of a steady succession of novelties, or indeed any departure from the prescribed offices. The fact is that the Irish church and the Irish priesthood have been cruelly and brutally maligned by pretty well every sand-blind writer and carpet-bagging politician who has visited the country. We have blamed upon the church poverty and distress and ignorance and squalor, which are the direct outcome of bad government and not of priestly cupidity. We have set in effect, to our Irish brethren, you are too indigent to have a religion or churches or spiritual guidance. Every penny you pay for these things is sheer waste of money, particularly as it keeps our rents down. It as much as you are of one church and one mind, which is a thing unthinkable in this free and enlightened England, you are slaves and soulless. But the church of Ireland goes on its way, and in the words of Archbishop Croke, which by the way Mr. McCarthy, Irish Catholic, quotes with a sneer, the Irish priesthood holds possession of the people's hearts to a degree unknown to any other priesthood in the world. For all practical purposes, and in spite of everything that can be brought against her, Ireland may be justly described as a moral country, even as Scotland is essentially an immoral country, an England, a middling one. It is true that we live in a time when morality has ceased to matter and virtue has become a reproach. The world has divided itself into two camps, the one scientific, the other artistic. Neither of them professes this smallest concern with morals. We have invented new and most blessedly euphonious names for the old wickednesses. Robbery is called competition, lying smartness, effrontery, pluck, cowardice, courtesy, avarice, thrift, cunning wisdom, and so forth. And when it pleases us, we can even find hard names for the Christian graces. The faith of Ireland, for example, has been discovered to be fanaticism, bigotry, paganism, materialism, idolatry, and I know not what besides. Her charity is credited for her pure solanimity, her patience and long suffering for indolence and apathy. What wonder, therefore, that the very chastity upon which her national morals are based should at length have been assailed. Hark into the inspired, ex-literary editor of the Daily Mail. The crowning achievement of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the thing which is unparalleled elsewhere in the world, is the complete and awful chastity of the people. There is many a country district where that incident, which in England and Scotland is regarded merely as a slight misfortune, is unknown and unimagined by the people. I have seen a man, the father of a grown-up family, blanch, and hold up his hands at the very name of it, as though even to breathe it were a blasphemy. And this in itself a good thing has reached such a point that it has become a dreadful evil. It is no longer a virtue. It is a blight. And the dear young gentleman goes on to assert that it is the chastity of the Irish people which fills Irish lunatic asylums, and exclaims disrambly, there may be no bastards in Ireland, but a hundred bastards would in Ireland's peculiar circumstances be a more gracious and healthy sign than one lunatic. Here surely is wisdom of the highest and most delightful type. We have already seen that the increase of lunacy in Ireland has been pronounced by the committee, which sat on the question in Dublin, to be mainly due to excessive drinking and the assimilation of adulterated spirits. The committee may not have been right, for my own part I believe it was decidedly wrong. But it delivered itself of no pronouncement which warrants either the scientific or the ribald to associate Irish lunacy with chastity, rather than with drink or other predispositions. If chastity fills the lunatic asylums, how come the Irish priesthood to be at large? Or for that matter the women of the English middle classes and honest women all the world over. And if bastardy be a preventative of lunacy, how comes it that in Scotland you have as many lunatics as you have in Ireland, and about ten times as many bastards? Can it be that of the two evils Caledonia with her customary shrewdness has chosen both? The suggestion is as ridiculous as it is abominable, and as scandalous as it is malicious. Even in the sense which our daily male young person may be presumed to have in mind, it is the direct opposite of chastity that helps to people lunatic asylums, and never chastity itself, blight or no blight. I mentioned this wholly unprecedented incursion into sophistry, only by way of showing what the astute censors of Ireland really can do when they set themselves to the work. And although I have no proof on the subject, I should like to wager that the author of it is an Orangeman, and of scotch extraction. It is no compliment to Ireland to say that, in theory, at any rate, or morals are entirely sound. In other words, Ireland believes in virtue and goodness, even though she may not always succeed in living up to her tenet, and though for reasons which need not be discussed, she may be possessed of primal dispositions to the sorriest evil. And it is the solemn and deplorable fact that there does exist in the Irish blood a tendency toward wickedness of the most ghastly and inhuman character. A case in point is afforded by the frightful doing to death of Mrs. Bridget Cleary at Bally-Vodley in 1895. The following account of this tragedy is abridged from Mr. McCarthy's Five Years in Ireland. Mrs. Cleary fell ill on Wednesday, the 13th of March, and sent for a doctor and a priest. The priest saw her in the afternoon. She was in bed, and she did not converse with him except as a priest, and her conversation was quite coherent and intelligible. The doctor also saw her, thought her illness slight, prescribed for her and left. On the morning of Thursday the 14th, Father Ryan was called to see Mrs. Cleary again. But he told the messenger that, having administered the last rites of the church on a previous day, there was no need to see her again so soon. William Simpson, a near neighbor of the Clearies, living only two hundred yards off, accompanied by his wife, left their own house between nine and ten o'clock on Thursday evening to visit Mrs. Cleary, having heard she was ill. When they arrived close to Cleary's house, they met Mrs. Johanna Burke, accompanied by her little daughter, Katie Burke, and inquired from her how Mrs. Cleary was. Mrs. Burke herself, a first cousin of Mrs. Cleary, said, they are giving her herbs, got from Ganny, over the mountain, and nobody will be let in for some time. These four people then remained outside the house for some time, waiting to be let in. Simpson heard cries inside and a voice shouting, Take it, you bastard, you old faggot, or we'll burn you. The shutters of the windows were closed and the door locked. After some time the door was opened, and from within shouts were heard, away she go, away she go. As Simpson afterward learned, the door had been open to permit the fairies to leave the house, and the adoration was addressed to those supernatural beings. In the confusion Simpson, his wife, Mrs. Burke and her little daughter, worked their way into the house. Simpson saw four men, John Dunn described as an old man, Patrick Kennedy, James Kennedy, and William Kennedy, all young men, big black-haired, tipperary peasants, brothers of Mrs. Burke and first cousins of Mrs. Cleary, holding Bridget Cleary down on the bed. She was on her back, and had a nightdress on her. Her husband, Michael Cleary, was standing by the bedside. Cleary called for a liquid and said, Throw it on her! Mary Kennedy, an old woman, mother of Mrs. Burke, and of all the other Kennedys present, brought the liquid. Michael Kennedy held the saucepan. The liquid was dashed over Bridget Cleary several times. Her father, Patrick Boland, was present. William Mayhearn described as a delicate youth of sixteen, was holding a candle. Bridget Cleary was struggling, vainly alas, on the bed, crying out, Leave me alone! Simpson then saw her husband give her some liquid with a spoon. She was held down by force by the men for ten minutes afterward, and one of the men kept his hand on her mouth. The men at each side of the bed kept her body swinging about the whole time, and shouting, Away with you! Come back, Bridget Boland! In the name of God! She screamed horribly. They cried out, Come home, Bridget Boland! From these proceedings, Simpson gathered that they thought Bridget Cleary was a witch, or had a witch in her, whom they endeavored to hunt out of the house by torturing her body. Sometime afterwards, she was lifted out of the bed by the men, or rather, demons, and carried to the kitchen fire by John Don, Patrick, William, and James Kennedy. Simpson saw red marks on her forehead, and someone present said they had to use the red poker on her to make her take the medicine. The four men named held poor Bridget Cleary in her nightdress over the fire, and Simpson could see her body resting on the bars of the grate where the fire was burning. While this was being done, we learned that the rosary was set. Her husband put her some questions at the fire. He said if she did not answer her name three times, they would burn her. She, poor thing, repeated her name three times after her father and her husband. Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary in the name of God? I am Bridget Boland, daughter of Patrick Boland, in the name of God. Simpson said they showed feverish anxiety to get her answers before twelve o'clock. They were all speaking and saying, do you think it is her that is there? And the answer would be yes, and they were all delighted. After she had answered the questions, they put her back into bed, and the women put a clean chemise on her, which Joanna Burke aired for her. She was then asked to identify each person in the room and did so successfully. The Kendredes left the house at one o'clock to attend the wake of Cleary's father, who was lying dead that night at Killenall. Dunn and Ahern left at two o'clock. It was six o'clock in the morning of the fifteenth after daybreak when the Simpsons and Johanna Burke left the house after those hellish orgies. There had been thirteen people present in Cleary's house on that night, yet no one outside the circle of the perpetrators themselves seems to have known or cared if they knew of the devilish goings-on in that laborer's cottage. At one time during that horrible night the poor victim said, the police are at the window. Let ye mind me now, but there were no police there. We now come to the third day, Friday, fifteenth of March. Six o'clock on that morning found Michael Cleary, the chief actor, Patrick Boland, and Barry Kennedy in the house with the poor victim when the two Simpsons and the two Berks were leaving. Simpsons says Cleary then went for the priest, as he wanted to have Mass said in the house to banish the evil spirits. This brings us back again to the Reverend Father Ryan, who says, at seven o'clock on Friday morning I was next summoned. Michael Cleary asked me to come to his house and celebrate Mass. His wife had had a very bad night. Father Ryan arrived at the cottage at a quarter past eight and said Mass in that awful front room where poor Bridget Cleary was lying in bed. She seemed more nervous and excited than on Wednesday, he says, and had her husband and father were present before Mass began. But I could not say who was there during its celebration. He had no conversation with Michael Cleary as to any incident which had occurred because he suspected nothing. When leaving he said, I asked Cleary, was he giving his wife the medicine the doctor ordered? Cleary answered that he had no faith in it. I told him that it should be administered. Cleary replied that people may have some remedy of their own that could do more good than doctor's medicine. Yet Father Ryan left the house suspecting nothing. Had he and his suspicion of foul play or witchcraft, he says, he should have at once absolutely refused to say Mass in the house and have given information to the police. After Father Ryan had set his Mass and left, Mrs. Cleary remained in bed. Simpson saw her there at midday and never saw her afterward. His excuse for his presence and non-interference on Thursday night is that the door was locked and he could not get out. We find the names of still more people mentioned as having visited her this day. She seems judging from the number of visitors to have been extremely popular. Johanna Burke seems to have been in the house the greater part of this day. At one time she tells how Cleary came up to the bedside and handed his wife a canister and said there was twenty pounds in it. She, poor creature, took it, tied it up, and told her husband to take care of it. But he would not know the difference till he was without it. She was in her right mind, only frightened at everything. At length the night fell upon the scene and at eight o'clock Cleary, who seems to have ordered all the other actors about as if they were hypnotized, sent Johanna Burke and her little daughter Katie for Thomas Smith and David Hogan. Smith says we all went to Cleary's and found Michael Cleary, Mary Kennedy, Johanna Mira, Pat Leahy, and Pat Boland in the bedroom. The husband had a bottle in his hand and said to the poor bewildered wife, will you take this now, as Thomas Smith and David Hogan are here? In the name of the father, son, and holy ghost. Thomas Smith, a man who said he had known her always since she was born, then inquired what was in the bottle. And Cleary told him it was holy water. Poor Bridget Cleary said yes, and she took it. She had to say before taking it, in the name of the father, son, and holy ghost, which she did. Smith and Hogan then left the bedside and went and sat at the fire. Cleary told them that his wife, as she had company, was going to get up. She actually left her bed and put on a frock and shawl and came to the kitchen fire. The talk turned upon bishogs or witchcraft and charms. Smith remained there till twelve o'clock and then left the house, leaving Michael Cleary, husband, Patrick Boland father, Mary Kennedy aunt, Patrick, James, and William Kennedy, cousins, Johanna Burke, and her little daughter Katie, also cousins, behind him in the house. Thomas Smith never saw a Bridget Cleary after that. According to Johanna Burke, they continued talking about fairies, and poor Bridget Cleary, sitting there by the fire in her frock and shawl, won and terrified, had said to her husband, your mother used to go with the fairies. That is why you think I'm going with them. Did my mother tell you that? exclaimed Cleary. She did. That she gave two nights with them, replied she. Johanna Burke then said she made tea and offered Bridget Cleary a cup. But Cleary jumped up and getting three bits of bread and jam, said she would have to eat them before she could take a sip. He asked her as he gave her each bit, are you Bridget Cleary, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of the father, son, and holy ghost? The poor, desolate young woman answered twice and swallowed two pieces. We all know how difficult it is, when wasted by suffering and excited by fear, to swallow a bit of dry bread without a drop of liquid to soften it. It, in fact, was the task set to those in the olden days who had to undergo the ordeal by bread. How many of them, we are told, fail to accomplish it. Poor Bridget Cleary failed now at the third bit, resented to her by the demon who confronted her. She could not answer the third time. He forced her to eat the third bit, he threatened her. If you won't take it, down you go. He flung her to the ground, put his knee on her chest, and one hand on her throat, forcing the bit of bread and jam down her throat. Swallow it! Swallow it! Is it down? Is it down? he cried. The woman Burke says she said to him, Mike, let her alone. Don't you see it is Bridget that is in it? And explains he suspected it was a fairy and not his wife. Let Burke now tell how the hellish murder was accomplished. Michael Cleary stripped his wife's clothes off, except her chemise, and got a lighted stick out of a fire and held it near her mouth. My mother, Mary Kennedy, brothers Patrick, James and William Kennedy, and myself wanted to leave. But Cleary said he had the key of the door, and the door would not be open till he got his wife back. They were crying in the room and wanting to get out. This crowd in the room crying, while Cleary was killing their first cousin in the kitchen. I saw Cleary throw lamp oil on her. When she was burning, she turned to me. Imagine that face of wool. And called out, oh, hen, hen! I endeavored to get out for the pealers. My brother William went up into the other room and fell in a weakness. And my mother threw Easter water over him. Bridget Cleary was all this time burning on the hearth. And the house was full of smoke and smell. I had to go up to the room. I could not stand it. Cleary then came up into the room where we were and took away a large sack bag. He said, hold your tongue, Hannah. It is not Bridget I'm burning. You will soon see her go up into the chimney. My brothers, James and William said, burn her if you like, but give us the key and let us get out. While she was burning, Cleary screamed out, she is burned now. God knows I did not mean to do it. When I looked down into the other room again, I saw the remains of Bridget Cleary lying on the floor on a sheet. She was lying on her face and her legs turned upward. As if they had contracted and burning. She was dead and burned. There is nothing which quite parallels the foregoing in the whole history of crime. At least a dozen persons, male and female, had knowledge of what was going on in that dreadful household over three days. Not one of them had bowels of compassion. Not one of them lifted a little finger in the victim's behalf. The majority of them were her blood relations. All of them were Catholics. Not one of them, but could have informed the priest, the doctor, or the police, of what was taking place had he or she then so minded. But the devilish poison, raging in the blood of the woman's husband, raged also in their veins. They stood fascinated in the presence of superstitions, which they had drawn in with their mother's milk. They believed in their hearts that Cleary and themselves were righteously, if terribly, occupied. They said the rosary, and they did all things in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. End of Chapter 9, Recording by John Brandon The women of England, not to say of Scotland, have of late years lain under the reproach that they are ceasing to be possessed of the fatal gift of beauty. I am well aware that there was not a reviewer exercising his calling between Land's End and John O'Groats, who will not profess to foam at the mouth on the strength of this statement. Yet the fact remains that ugliness is rapidly becoming the common heritage of English women and scotch women alike. There is an old superstition, not of course tolerable, to the minds of the smart people of today, that wickedness, or not to put too fine a point upon it. Ugliness of temperament is calculated gradually to induce ugliness of physique. Without going into the question of the general wickedness of Anglo-Saxon femininity, we may put it down for a scientific fact that the beauty of them is wearing away. Let us hope to the land of the leal. In those remarkably aesthetic organs, which sell fifty process block portraits per week for sixpence, we are treated continually to what the editors take for types of English beauty. You pay your sixpence, and you open your hot pressed beauty show. On the first page, that is of course after the advertisements, you have a speaking presentment of something with elaborate hair and an inexhaustible fund of torso, which frankly might pass very well for a sign to a public house called the Bald Face Stag. Beneath you read in capital letters Miss or Mrs. so-and-so, the famous beauty. No woman in England apparently is allowed to know whether she be beautiful or not, until either Mr. Kebel Howard Bell or Mr. J. M. Bullock has so labeled her. Bell and Bullock being of course the only possible judges of feminine beauty England possesses. In the politest circles it is quite dangerous to praise a woman's good looks without reference to the files of the sketch and the tatler. A certain nobleman however is understood to have earned something of a reputation for himself as connoisseur to openly avowing his contempt for both sheets and surreptitiously swatting up the picture pages of the Daily Mirror. This however, like the Daily Mirror, is probably neither here nor there. The solemn fact remains that the beauty of England's fairest daughters and Scotland's banniest lasses alike has become a doubtful quantity. Any person who is troubled with qualms on the subject need only visit a court or an opera or Messrs. Peter Robinson's or an ABC shop or a mother's meeting. Hard faces, bleary eyes, saw teeth, humpy shoulders and an undignified gait, not to mention greasy complexions, scanty hair, bony hands and nock knees are the rule and not the exception among English woman kind. We have scarcely a beauty left even at the Gayety Theatre. In fact, leaving out the ravishing pictures of the illustrated press, there are really only two beautiful women in England and both of these are married to reviewers. Now I say and maintain that any male person possessed of an eye for the charms of what is commonly called the opposite sex will find that in Ireland the decay of female beauty has not yet commenced. Whether he be in Dublin or in Cork, in Sligo or in Limerick, pretty women take his vision as the daffodils take the winds of March at every corner. In fine it may be said without exaggeration that if Ireland possesses a characteristic which renders her entirely different from the countries to which on the face of it she displays a sort of second hand tumbled down resemblance, it is the prettiness of her women. I take it for granted that this trait has been commented upon by other travellers, but I do not think that it has heretofore been in any sense properly impressed upon the public mind. It is generally understood among artists that Irish women have delicate hands and an eye with a sparkle about it. Irish poets, in more or less halting English verse, have done their best to indicate that Irish women are, to say the least of it, worth looking at. But I am not aware that on the whole the literature about Ireland exists to anything like a reasonable degree on the beauty of Irish women. If the present work were from the exquisite pen of Mr Arthur Simons, our failure adequately to portray the beauty of Erin's daughters would no doubt be counterbalanced by the insertion of a selection of half-tone portraits of representative specimens. As it is we are compelled to admit that words fail us, and that even if we cared to employ them the process blockmakers would fail us also. It may be said roughly that the beauty of an Irish woman, while quite tangible and perfect to the vision, is an elusive matter when one comes to cold type. The Anglo-Saxon beauty can be hit off in words, quite as handily as she can be hit off in paint. What she amounts to as a rule is pink and white and yellow hair or mouse-coloured hair and a gentile validity. But in Ireland, all this is different. Beauty of a witching and almost irrequality is commonplace throughout the country. An Irishman will speak to you of the red-haired woman or that flip of a girl, when he meets pieces of loveliness that Titian might have given his eye teeth for a sight of. In France at the present moment there was an artist who was understood to be making a fortune by drawing pretty faces. He could find more subjects for his pencil in a day in Dublin than he could find in a month in Paris. For this information I make no charge. Even Mr. Gibson, who appears to have invented a girl of his own, might do very well out of the green country. Mr. Gibson's young lady is believed to typify the fairest that the United States of America can boast. At times, and when Mr. Gibson is at his best, she is undoubtedly a young woman of pre-possessing appearance, that she is also a truly American type, maybe taken for granted. There are plenty of women in Ireland, however, who come quite up to the Gibson girl standard, and for that matter beat it. In journeying through the country, I have been struck continually by the remarkable facial resemblance which exists between the Irish and the American people. In an Irish railway train, you see faces which at once give you the impression that you are at the hotel Cecil, the high cheekbones and lank-shaven jaw of the full-bodied American are here in great force, and it is only when they are possessors over their mouths that you can tell the difference. Of course the thing is accounted for by the fact that a very considerable proportion of the population of America is Irish, and that for a hundred years Ireland has been sending her best blood to the States. Besides being comely, the Irish women have the advantage of what one may term an individual beauty. In England you might rake together forty beautiful blondes and twenty pretty brunettes, and discover that they were merely blondes and brunettes and nothing more. That is to say, the blondes might readily pass for sisters, and so might the brunettes. Both sorts lacking the ultimate gift of individuality. Irish women are different. Indeed, you may safely say of them that they are all pretty and all different. They never repeat their beauty. There is nothing in the white rabbit or puss puss puss about them, and consequently they do not bore you. As most things have a cause, it seems possible that there are reasons for the beauty of Irish womanhood. For myself, I should be disposed to ascribe it to the circumstance that the average Irish woman, the she rich or poor, leads the life which a woman was intended to lead by the order of things, namely the domestic life. Irish women are not without the wit to know that they are beautiful. They have an armory of feminine allurements, and wit enough to handle them with skill, and they cannot be considered insensible to the fripperies which all women love. But they do not make gaiety an ostentation, the aim and end of their existence, and they do not shirk the plain duties of womanhood. In Ireland, though the women of the poorer classes have to work in the fields, and undertake tasks which by good rites should be done by men, there is absolutely no third sex. The manly woman, the emancipated woman, and the impertinent flat-chested typewriter banger, which so infest Great Britain, are unknown, even in the Irish sportswoman. And as everybody knows, she is pretty numerous, retains her womanliness in a way that is quite beyond the horsey or doggie woman of the shiars, so that in one respect, at least, Ireland may be reckoned something of a paradise. End of Chapter 10 Recording by John Brandon