CHAPTER XVII
THE TOURIST

The tourist is the curse of Ireland, as he is the curse of most places. When one comes to consider the enormous number of grievances the Irish and their political figure-heads have managed to rake up, one wonders that the tourist should hitherto have escaped. That he constitutes a grievance, and a grievance which affects seriously the main body of the Irish people, can not be doubted. It is quite obvious, to begin with, that the tourist in Ireland is usually of the hated Sassenach race. Irishmen do not tour in their own country as Englishmen do, or as Scotchmen have been known to do. They have too little money for indulgences of that kind, and if money be plentiful they prefer to visit England or America. The Englishman, however, insists on taking a holiday in Ireland sometime in his life, even though it be only on his honeymoon. So that in the more suitable months the country bristles with tourists, and the great majority of them are English. Secondly, the tourist, being English, is always more or less hilarious, supercilious and aggressive, and these are qualities of which the Irish of all people least like a display, at any rate from an Englishman. Time out of mind the English tourist has been the covert bête noire of the Continental peoples on account of these very traits. An Englishman on the Continent, especially if he be a middle-class Englishman, or a very wealthy Englishman, has a knack of divesting himself utterly of the thin veneer of social decency which he manages to maintain at home. Somehow the air of the Continent exhilarates him to all sorts of posturing and ridiculousness. The vulgarian, the Philistine and the snob in him become greatly emphasized. He can shout aloud, and be rude to everybody, because he believes that nobody understands what he is pleased to call his lingo. Besides which the Englishman on the Continent always believes in his private bosom that he is a philanthropist, a sort of circular-touring benevolence, as it were. “Who is it,” he inquires grandiloquently, “that keeps these pore foreigners going? Why, the English, and the English alone. It is we who bring millions of pounds to their starved, tax-burdened countries. It is we who populate their rapacious hotels and make their seasons for them, and drop our idiot moneys at their gambling tables, and pay francs at the entrances to their art galleries, and climb their rotten mountains, and steam, to soft Lydian airs, up their rivers, and bathe in their lukewarm seas, and tip them and patronize them, and joke with them, and generally afford them opportunities for existence.” This attitude has been noted and laughed at by the cynical, time out of mind; but it can not be eradicated from the Englishman’s fairly comprehensive stock of idiosyncrasies, and it remains to this day typical of the breed. To Ireland the English tourist proceeds focused for pretty well the same view of things. Of course, he is disposed to look upon your Irishman as being rather more of a man and a brother than is the low foreigner. Further, he invariably believes that by a judicious expenditure on “drinks,” coupled with an easy, slap-you-on-the-back but still superior manner, he can extract from the Irishmen with whom he comes in contact the whole secret of the Irish Question. In other words, he makes a point of going to Ireland with his eyes open; so that when he returns he may remark huskily in his club—“Sir, I have visited Ireland, and I know the Irish people through and through. Waiter, a large Scotch, please!” Thus is the altruism of the tourist in Ireland tempered with a taste for inquiry and politics. I suppose that in no country in the world is the tourist allowed so much of his fling as in this same green Erin. For example, in Ireland he takes care to call every man “Pat,” and every woman “Kathleen mavourneen.” If he called a Frenchman “Froggy,” or a German “Johnny Deutscher” he would stand a good chance of getting his nose pulled. But in Ireland a bold peasantry has learned to smile and smile and touch the hat, and take the coppers, and provide the political information for which his honor is gasping without so much as turning a hair. It is not really in the Irish blood to take these traveling mountebanks, with their loud suits and louder manners and louder money, seriously or even indifferently. On the other hand, your true Irish resent in their hearts the entire business. It is their poverty and not their wills which consent; though singularly enough, as I have already said, you will seldom find an Irishman indulging himself in growls about it. And it is this very poverty which might reasonably give rise to the Irishman’s third grievance against the tourist. For an Englishman traveling in Ireland is always a sort of perambulating incitement to envy, because of his apparent wealth. He may be only a clerk out for a fortnight’s “rest and change” on money squeezed out of the meagerest kind of salary; yet to the penniless Irishman he seems literally to be made of wealth. And Pat—let us call him Pat, so that the tourists of this world may know whom we mean—is not without certain reasoning powers of his own, poverty-stricken though he may be. It seems to me only human that he should reason about the English tourist in a way which brings him little comfort and throws considerable discredit on England. He perceives that compared with himself the Englishman is not altogether a person of genius or an angel of light. His ignorance is appalling, even to an Irishman; his manners are none of the choicest; his capacity for eating and drinking borders on the marvelous. “Pat” notes these things and wonders. He wonders why there should be such tremendous gulfs between loving subjects of the King. He wonders where people who travel on cheap tickets get all their money; he wonders how they manage to pay fifty pounds a rod for certain fishing; or fifty pounds a gun for certain shooting; he wonders why they cackle so about priestcraft, and Home Rule, and the development of industry; he wonders whether they have really been elected by heaven to be a dominant people; he wonders why he himself should have been given over to their governance; and with all his wondering he is not consoled. There is probably nobody to tell him that for irremediable reasons the Irish are never likely to become a happy and prosperous nation. There is nobody to tell him that this dazzling Englishman is so much gross material, with no tradition of spirituality at the back of him. There is nobody to tell him that it is the British habit to think first and foremost of its own welfare and comfort, and that it pities rather than admires those countries or persons who have been foredoomed to contribute to them. Therefore he goes on wondering without consolation, and within him there is discontent and bitterness, despite his outward subservience. There has been very tall talk in sundry well-meaning circles as to the advantages which are to accrue to Ireland from the development of her trade in tourists. No doubt it is extremely heterodox to say so, but for myself, I incline to the opinion that the tourist business on its present lines is a snare and a delusion and a demoralization. It takes money into the country certainly, but it takes other things which are not by any means so desirable. Moreover, that very money helps materially to cloud and confuse important issues. The real condition of Ireland, as it is known to Irish officialdom, and as it should be known to Englishmen, is glossed over and hidden away as a direct result of the eleemosynary tendencies of the English tourist. A people of the temper and parts of the Irish people should be in a position to live out of Irish land and Irish industry, and not be in any serious sense dependent upon the fitful generosity of sight-seers and problem-solvers. Ireland has had far too much largesse, both private and public. The English tourist distributes his shillings; the English Government distributes its loans and other financial bolsterings-up. What is wanted is a fair field and no favor for Irish labor. It will take many generations of tourists to provide for Ireland any such good gift. I do not believe that the Government loans can provide either. A newer and little less rapacious and less unintelligent race of landlords might achieve it. The bland, benevolent money-dropping Englishman, who out of his generosity or his scheme of politics desires to assist the Irish people, should buy a place in Ireland and do his best to live there. The country is full of properties which would be cheap at treble the prices that are now being asked for them. There is plenty of land and there is plenty of labor. The Land Laws, it is true, seem on the face of them ridiculous, that is to say, if you happen to be a landlord whose eye is forever on the rent-roll and the automatic improvement of properties at other people’s expense. But if, on the other hand, you are a comfortable, high Tory, patriarchal landlord, with bowels, and a proper appreciation of sport, and a proper interest in agriculture and the breeding of cattle, Ireland need have no terrors for you. There is a notion abroad that the Irish farmer has deep-rooted prejudices against landlords of whatever degree. We are told that he is a confirmed shirker of the prime duty of rent-paying, and that he will let a holding go to rack and ruin for the sole purpose of cheapening its value, so that he may himself buy it in for the merest song. The demand throughout the country, we are told, is for farmer and peasant proprietorship, and the legislature has formulated wonderful machinery in the interest of such proprietorship. My own view is that of two evils the Irish cultivators have in this matter chosen the lesser. On the one hand they had rack rents, absentee landlords and agents who, if they had bodies to be shot, appear to have had very small souls to be saved. On the other hand, they have been offered schemes of purchase that sound very well but do not work out quite so well in practise. Still a bad scheme of purchase is better than bad landlords and worse agents. An intelligent and reasonable landlord of bucolic tastes, who will look as sharply after his agent or factor as he will look after his tenants on rent-day, could in my opinion do quite as well in Ireland as he can do in England. In a sentence, Ireland wants settling, not touring.

CHAPTER XVIII
POTATOES

A gentleman who is universally applauded as a handler of the pencil and a smart after-dinner speaker lately remarked that if he were compelled to give up one of two things, to wit, tobacco or Christianity, he would give up Christianity. Then, with a slack-minded man’s weakness, he went on to explain that a Christianity which prohibited tobacco would not be Christianity at all. “When all things were made,” we are told, “nothing was made better than tobacco.” Without being an anti-tobacconist, without being a non-smoker, without, indeed, being other than “a great blower of the cloud,” it is quite reasonable for one to doubt whether on the whole tobacco is the blessing that modern men hold it to be. There is no evidence to show that men’s intellects have improved since the introduction of smoking. It seems probable that the high-water mark of British brains had been reached somewhat prior to the time in which James I. had occasion to adorn polite letters with his notorious “Counterblast.” Shakespeare did not smoke. Mitcham shag was nothing to Ben Jonson, nor navy plug to Milton. It is our Barries, and our J. K. Jeromes, and our F. C. Goulds who electrify the country with their pipes in their mouths. Now, the person who is commonly credited with having introduced the art and practise of tobacco smoking into England is Sir Walter Raleigh. There is a legend that when that gentleman’s servant first saw him smoking, he rushed out for a bucket of water, in the belief that his master was on fire. By a strange coincidence, it is this same Sir Walter Raleigh who is commonly credited with having introduced the potato into Ireland. Could Sir Walter Raleigh’s servant have perceived what black and fearsome troubles the potatoes in his master’s pockets or other receptacle would one day call down upon the Irish people, it is conceivable that he might have rushed out for something even more drastic than a bucket of water. The potato, undoubtedly, is an elegant fruit. All men know that with beef, mutton, and flesh meats in general, it is everything that could be desired. As a staple article of food, however, it cannot be considered otherwise than as a flagrant and wicked mistake. In Ireland the potato has become a staple article of food. Whole generations of Irishmen have battened upon it—in good times, with the addendum of a little buttermilk or a scrap of bacon, in bad times with the addendum of a pinch of salt. And as the times in Ireland have been immemorially bad times, the pinch of salt has been most frequently to the fore. In plain words, the Irish people are a potato-fed people. In theory the potato might well have been specially created by Providence to fit in with the Irish temperament. The Irish temperament has distinct tendencies in the direction of indolence; the potato, heaven be thanked, is a tuber which does not demand too great a skill or too great an amount of labor in cultivation. You cut it up, dump it into the ground, and it grows of itself. Also it is a prolific plant, and will make more dead weight to the rood than almost anything else that grows—the which, of course, saves digging. A peasant with a potato-patch is believed to be wholly beyond the reach of hunger, and his standard of emolument may conveniently be adjusted for him accordingly. He himself is aware that it is out of his potato-patch that he and his family have got to subsist, and that all the rest is luxury of the most bloated order. Philosophers can invariably dispense with luxury, and the Irishman is a philosopher. He can afford to sit and watch his potatoes growing, as content as any king. For not only shall that green plant yield unto him and the “childer” the staff of life, but it shall also furnish for him the wherewithal for the innocent manufacture of potheen, which is life itself. It is a singular fact, though a fact big with meaning, that while the Irishman has been a potato-grower from Raleigh’s time, he has not succeeded in attracting to himself any special reputation as a cultivator in this department. Nobody sets up the Irish potato for a peculiar delicacy. Jersey, Cheshire, Lancashire, and parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire have secured for themselves all the glory and honor and profit which is to be got out of potato-growing. It is said, however, that the Irish can cook a potato against anybody in the world; but this is doubtful, inasmuch as the Dublin potato—and for that matter the Cork or Kilkenny or Newry potato—is neither better nor worse cooked than the common tuber of Cockaigne. This, however, is by the way. The hard fact is that all over Ireland you are brought face to face with a poverty and a desolation which are the palpable outcome of too great a reliance upon a doubtful staple. The very physique of the people bears abundant witness to the circumstance that a diet of pure potato is not good for one. It induces a ricketiness of build, a lankness and a want of tone; not to mention a confirmed hungriness of look. Quite half the people of Ireland might pass for persons who had lately been emulating the fasting man, or had just been let loose from a severe term of penal servitude. It is intolerable that it should be so, but there is no getting away from it. The Irish people are physiologically underfed. They may eat to repletion, but as even an Irish potato consists mainly of starch and water, precious little corporeal good is to be got out of it. When the body is starved, the mind dwindles and languishes. A potato-fed man can no more be witty or wise or energetic than a man fed on draff and husks. That is why the Irish have almost entirely lost the spirits and the volatility and the graces for which they were formerly renowned. If you are to make good use of an Irishman, as of any other man, you must ply him with nutriment. The potato is not nutriment in anything like a complete sense. Even that exceedingly popular work, The Encyclopædia Britannica, has no feeling for the potato where the Irish are concerned. Under the head of “Ireland” I find, among others, the following sentences: “Introduced by Raleigh in 1610, the cultivation of this dangerous tuber developed with extraordinary rapidity.” “When Petty wrote, early in Charles II.’s reign, this demoralizing esculent was already the national food.” “When the ‘precarious exotic’ failed, an awful famine was the result.” The Encyclopædia Britannica also obliges us with the appended information: “The labor of one man could plant potatoes enough to feed forty.… Potatoes cannot be kept very long, but there was no attempt to keep them at all; they were left in the ground, and dug as required. A frost which penetrated deep caused the famine of 1739. Even with the modern system of storing in pits, the potato does not last through the summer, and the ‘meal months’—June, July and August—always brought great hardship.… Between 1831 and 1842, there were six seasons of dearth, approaching in some places to famine.… In 1845 the population had swelled to 8,295,061, the greater part of whom depended on the potato only.” The greater part of the population of Ireland proper—that is to say of Ireland with Northern Diamond left out—depends upon the potato to this day. It is a state of affairs which cannot be too severely deprecated; it is a state of affairs which ought in no circumstances to be allowed to continue; it is a state of affairs which convinces one only too clearly that Ireland has for centuries been governed either by rogues or by blockheads. Yet the potato, like the tourist, does not appear hitherto to have been written down for an Irish grievance or injustice. True, The Encyclopædia Britannica condemns it as we have seen; but it does so rather by innuendo than of set purpose. I am not aware that the restriction of potato growing has ever figured as a plank in the platform of the Irish Party. Indeed, to suggest it, would have looked like infamy in the face of the condition of the people. But until the Irish are taught that the potato is not the first and last thing God made, they will remain open to the disasters and the disabilities which too great a dependence upon it have invariably brought about. It is lamentable to note the limitations of the Irish mind as to what is possible in the matter of food. With sixpence, your indigenous, starving Irishman will purchase inevitably a dish of potatoes and as much whisky as can be screwed out of the money when the potatoes have been paid for. The beer and bread and cheese, or bread and bacon of the English rustic may be reckoned a Lucullian feast in comparison, and they are at least three times more nourishing to the body, if not to the brain. And the worst of it is, that your proper potato-fed Irishman cannot forego his hereditary appetite for the “esculent” aliment of his country any more than a Scotchman can forego oatmeal and offal. In the midst of plenty an Irishman of the Irish will make for potatoes as surely as the needle makes for the north. He prefers them. To take an instance, Mr. George Bernard Shaw believes himself to be a vegetarian by free-will and out of altruism. In point of fact, vegetarianism is easy and possible for him, because he is an Irishman, and consequently comes of an ingrained, potato-feeding stock, however remote. His wit and other parts, if any, are to be accounted for by the circumstance that he has the good sense to supplement his potato-flour with pea-meal, coco-butter, and other garnishes. A few thousand tons of lentils, with pepper and salt to taste, would do Ireland more good than a new Land Act. She has had enough potato and enough Land Acts to last her for the next hundred years.