THE HEAD CONSTABLE.
and, though the peasant bundled away, rolling like a bolting bear, Mr A—— succeeded in lodging a couple of sound lashes with his horsewhip. A small crowd gathered; of course it took part against the strangers, and a free fight became imminent. This was prevented by the chief constable, whose badge is the tallest hat I ever did see, and who commands a body of three men, armed with the “Northern Star.” When appealed to, however, the dignitary distinctly refused to take his fellow-countryman into custody; hence, perhaps, the freedom of the jails from jail-birds, a peculiarity strongly insisted upon by complimentary writers, and quaintly corresponding with our “gratifying diminution of crime.” This is not what we read about Iceland and the Icelanders. It of course will be said that fair time is approaching, and that we are at Reykjavik, a centre of dissipation, where men are eagerly looking forward to the arrival of a grind-organ.
This appears to be the place for inserting a few remarks upon the subject of drinking in Iceland compared with that of England and Scotland. I had asserted in the Standard that “more cases of open, shameless drunkenness may be seen during a day at Reykjavik than during a month in England and Scotland.” A gentleman interested in the matter writes to me: “According to the only official returns of Icelandic statistics (’Skýrslur um landshagi (resources of the country) á Íslandi, gefnar út af hinu islenska Bókmenntäfélagi,’ Kaupmannahöfn, 8vo), from 1865 to 1869, the date of the last publication, the consumption of intoxicating drinks has been steadily decreasing. Thus in—
| 1865 the | amount of | 2 | gallons 6½ | pints | were | drunk per head. |
| 1866 | ” | 2 | ” | 1 | ” | ” |
| 1867 | ” | 1 | ” | 6 | ” | ” |
| 1868 | ” | 1 | ” | 4 | ” | ” |
| 1869 | ” | 1 | ” | 3 | ” | ” |
In 1869 the gross total used in the island was thus one gallon and three pints per head. In Scotland the consumption of spirits alone for 1870 was a fraction of a gill less than two gallons a head (Parliamentary return for 1870 relating to spirits, beer, and malt spirits), and in the United Kingdom one gallon a head. I have not been able to ascertain the quantity of wines consumed, nor the proportion contributed by the secret stills of Scotland and Ireland; but of beer and spirits together, the consumption in the United Kingdom was no less than thirty gallons per head per annum. You must remember that the Icelanders have no spirits equal in strength to whiskies and French brandies. You must also remark in connection with the drunkenness observed by you at Reykjavik that you were there during the trading season, when people flock to the capital. They have not tasted, perhaps, a drop of intoxicating liquor during nine or ten months, and they make up for their sobriety by a fortnight or so of indulgence. I have known several peasants who bought a keg of Danish brandy at the trading-place, and who made free use of it during their homeward journey, and as long after as the supply lasted. Then they did not taste a drop till the next season, for the very good reason that they could not get it. It would therefore not be quite fair to state, as a general condition of the Icelanders, what might be observed at Reykjavik during the fair, from about the middle of June to the end of July. It would be equally unjust to show up the condition of Londoners on Boxing Night, or of the Scotch on New Year’s Day, not to speak of every Saturday night.”
To this I reply. In 1834 the consumption was only 2 bottles of spirits per head; on the whole, therefore, there is an increase. Between 1849-62 (Paijkull[379]) the imports had increased 79 per cent., and in the latter year the consumption per head was of 6·7 Danish pots or quarts, when Scotland uses 1½ gallons per head. Mr Consul Crowe (1870-71, p. 648) shows that the consumption is “about 24 quarts annually for every adult male, without counting ale, wine, rum, punch extract, and other spirituous drinks imported.” My stay in Iceland lasted not till the end of July, but till September the first. I found drunkenness prevail not only in the capital, but in the farm-houses; and, as the trading stations and market-ships are now scattered all round the coast, there is no difficulty in obtaining spirits throughout the year. Since 1869, the practice has apparently increased with the growth of commerce. As regards the figures, they are like facts perfectly capable of misleading as well as leading. The statistics of a sparse and scattered population can hardly be expected to be correct; for instance, the fleet of French fishing vessels smuggles a quantity of cognac which does not appear in the returns. The Consular Report (1870-71, p. 650) adds, “The consumption of ardent spirits in the island is very great, being as 490,000 imperial quarts annually (or 490,000: 70,000), and of this large quantities are landed by the foreign fishermen, who barter it with the natives for their fish and other raw produce.” We all issued from the “Queen” with more or less whisky, about which nothing was asked or said; and this may counter-balance even the large produce of the “secret stills” existing in Ireland,[380] but rare in England, Wales, and Scotland. Also what is consumed in Iceland is almost entirely drunk by the men—I never saw that disgrace of our great cities, a drunken woman.
The actual state of things is not what is shown by the figures. An eminent Icelander openly asserted that he had dived into the gin-palaces of London and Edinburgh, yet that he had seen more drunkenness in a day at Reykjavik than during his whole visit to Great Britain. This comparison with a nation which derives £13,000,000 of revenue from spirits alone, and which has “drunk itself out of the Alabama difficulty,” is telling. There have been repeated attempts to establish teetotalism, but none have succeeded—perhaps a whisky war might lead to victory. And here hard drinking is apparently a little reprobated practice. A party of English travellers lodged at the house of an educated man, who, fresh from a visit to Denmark, expressed the dulce domum and domesticity sentiment by loud and late striving in strong liquors. The same tourists engaged a guide, who kept himself sober during the march, but afterwards broke out in a way which prevented his re-engagement, sleeping unter freien himmel, and so forth.
That our vices like our virtues are regulated by our “media,” no traveller can doubt. Thus in England, out of an annual total of 150,000 souls “drunk and disorderly,”[381] the number proceeded against in the south (not including London) was 3·2: 1000; in the Midland district, 4·0: 1000; whilst in the north it rose to the extreme ratio of 10·8: 1000. These figures show, if evidence be wanted, that “as we go north drunkenness increases.” The classical Scandinavian and the Northmen generally were deep topers, quarrelsome withal; their wives always removed their weapons when they sat down to drink; and they looked forward to a Houri-lacking and pro tempore paradise, where the dead rode forth daily to cut one another to pieces, and rode back to gorge nasty boiled pork and swill vasty draughts of bilious mead. In the south, take Europe for instance, men hold wine to be the ἰατρεῖον ψυχῆς, and prefer to over-nourishment gambling, or what we call immorality, in the confined sense of the word. Race, again, heredity and atavism, or the habits bequeathed by forefathers, modify climate: the Slav, for example, who occupies the same latitudes as the abstemious Turk and Italian, is a hard eater and wine-bibber. And I have a conviction that spirit-drinking is becoming common in countries where it was formerly almost unknown. During a late ride to Ronda in Spain, two drunken men were seen in one day, and three appeared at an Italian country-fair—these are instances out of many which might be quoted.
In England, on the other hand, drinking in society has been modified not solely, as we flatter ourselves, by better taste or by a “higher tone,” but also by the increased use of nicotine—an axiom which will be grateful to the readers of Cope’s Tobacco Plant, and unpleasant to gentlemen of the happily defunct Palmerstonian school. In the age of Queen Anne apparently all Englishmen smoked. The Continental war made the practice “un-English,” and an increase of snuff was the result. At Oxford, shortly before I matriculated, some youth of heroic mould, who deserves a statue if any one does, lit a cigar almost immediately after the hall-dinner. He was called hard names, but he persevered, and he found imitators: the consequence was a notable curtailing of the “wines” which used to last from seven to eleven P.M. In 1852 I was objurgated, and not unfrequently cut, for smoking a manilla in the streets of London. Very shortly afterwards a ducal reformer spread his plaid under a tree in Hyde Park, produced a briar-root, and expected his friends to do likewise. I need hardly say that they did.