A voice: “Rack rents.”
“They knew the man from his boyhood, from his gossoonhood. He knew him when he began with a collop of sheep as 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 parish schoolmasters who could teach him grammar for the next ten years. The man was in fact a Uriah Heep among Kerry landlords.” (Cheers.)
Here surely is blarney with a vengeance. Among a people which was otherwise than glib of expression such writing and 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 objurgation, what wonder is it that the commonalty should be found to have lost their sense of 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 ha’penny papers 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, landlordism in Ireland would never have been scotched. As it is, the landlord has been put in his place and the chances of the natural heirs 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 commination. Under the heel of the tyrant the Irish people retained 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 Wight. There is 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 a 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 the 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 Celt 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. Blarney even of the vituperative 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 blarney, I hope sincerely that they never will.
CHAPTER IV
WHISKY
The Universe as we know it abounds in enigmas. And perhaps the most stupendous enigma of all of them is called whisky. In Scotland whisky is the universal ichor 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 baser 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, plantigrade 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, excepting that he take them in thimblefuls, and then only in the shape of nightcaps. And lest the United Kingdom Alliance misconstrue 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 a life of Father Mathew. 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 Dunville, Jamieson et hoc genus, 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 Gaul takes his wine. When you see a number of drunken persons in Ireland, you may safely assume that they are Orangemen and of 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. Hussey, Irish whisky is “vilely adulterated,” both by the publican and “in some of the factories.” In support of this statement he tells the following story: “On one occasion a Killorglin 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 practise 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 gentleman who ate fly-papers in mistake for oatcake, they are poison-proof. Frankly, I should be disposed to take Mr. Hussey’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. Hussey admits that wakes are on the decline, and not by any means the occasions for over-indulgence 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 a 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. Hussey 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