The island blooms like a rose. Primroses make no secret of it now—they are everywhere, and begin to bring with them young blue-bells, “ter’ble shoy,” but they’ll soon get over that. I went up Sulby Glen a bit the other day: the gorse there, as elsewhere, is a mass of golden flame; and I heard the cuckoo....
Ballaglass is delicious in the sunlight with the beechen spray breathing over it. Also its primroses are good, also its blue-bells. As yet the blue-bells are hesitant or apologetic. Of course you know that later on they will attend the funeral of the primroses with a mighty mourning of hyacinthine blooms; and then they will become quite cheeky and truculent, and make the ground their own.
Hills above the Gob-y-volley at the mouth of Sulby Glen, twice; perfection of gorse hassocks, tufted with bell-heather, also of ling in sheets, sprinkled with the bell-heather—the sea-rim rounding all with glorious blue—the steamer going round the island with an almost impudent familiarity of approach, like a “Cotton”[50] throwing his arms round the neck of a pretty Manx country-girl—“smookin, too, the dirt.”
Only fragmentary glimpses of these scenes were vouchsafed to us, but they were enough to enhance our enjoyment of the book. Schools were our urgent suitors; they engrossed our attention, and what we saw of the beauties of nature was, in the main, what we passed on our way to and from schools.
Of the schools themselves there is little to be said that could interest even a professional reader. They are for the most part hampered by poverty. Not that the island is poor, though it produces little, and the harvest of the sea is sorely reduced at present; the trippers are a copper-mine of wealth. It is said that on an average each visitor spends at least a sovereign, and I have heard the income calculated at £1,500,000. A fair proportion of this must reach the farmers, but it requires a specially high tide to bring it to the door of the school. It must be remembered that the island is afflicted with Home Rule. It pays £10,000 a year to the Imperial Exchequer, and manages its own affairs. No Act of the Imperial Parliament affects it, unless it is specially named. Certain Acts are adopted by Tynwald (the Insular Parliament) when they are considered suitable. But the Education Act of 1902, substituting a central authority for the parochial organisation, and increasing the Government contribution, was not so adopted. Therefore the twenty-one School Boards, with £1,000 worth of clerks, &c., remain to manage the forty-seven schools, and teachers find their salaries so low that they seek their fortunes across the water.
No doubt the island suffers, as all tourist places in our country suffer, from Parasitism; and the sentence which Mr. Drummond, in his chapter on that social disease, quotes from Professor Ray Lankester, should be pondered in all such resorts:
Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to degeneration.—“Natural Law, &c.,” p. 317.
For ten weeks or so there are crowded hours of prosperity: then comes the long period of retrospection, followed by a longer period of anticipation, neither being remunerative. Even in the season of prosperity I doubt if the contemplation of Lancashire trippers, frequently tripping, can be any more beneficial to the parasite than it is pleasant to the philosophic onlooker. (See T. E. Brown, passim.)
Of other work than agriculture there is little: there is some—I know not how much—lead-mining: the herring and the mackerel have all but deserted the coasts; men say that the steam-trawlers have ruined the trade.
The really serious cloud on the horizon is the want of a career open to talent: young men who have brains, or ambition—still more those who have both—seek their fortunes in a larger market, and the tendency to fill up the gaps with the weedy poitrinaire, and the seedy genteel indigent, is still more alarming.