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 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 almost unthinkable poverty and squalor of the greater part of the population. When you couple with poverty, want of occupation, a solitary life, and an enervating 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 poteen his lunacy is necessarily due to poteen, 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 but 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.
CHAPTER V
THE PATHRIOT
Ireland has produced more patriots than any other country under the sun. The names of them are legion, and from Wolfe Tone down to Dr. Tanner they have all been men of reasonable parts. O’Connell, Emmet, 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 pathriot, it is only within comparatively recent times that the authentic pathriot has come into being. The fact that in England people are unkind enough to call him an agitator is of small consequence. The pathriot 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 pathriot 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 to-day who care twopence where he is, or could tell you what becomes of him when Parliament is not sitting. He will end obscurely, inasmuch as it is the fate of Irish pathriots so to end. As the chief of the pathriots 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 pathriot of the finest water. The vital defect in the character of the Irish pathriot, looking at him squarely, is that in recent times at any rate he has never been a statesman. A pathriot 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 pathriots. 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 statesmanlike 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 pathriots, 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 sarcasms and humors 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 pathriot of our own 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 merest nonentities, and she can bestow reverence and undying fame upon persons who are little removed from mediocrity. The modern pathriot has never risen above the foot-hills; yet for Ireland he stands upon the pinnacle, and they say Hosanna to him. It is a sign of the times, however, that Erin is beginning to be alive to the fact that in the main the pathriot is just one of those persons with whom she 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 pathriots 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.
CHAPTER VI
ORANGEMEN
In matters Irish it is quite usual to talk of aiming at the manifestly impossible. If we could get rid of the priests, say some, 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 Orangemen. 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 Donegal on Tuesday, 12th July 1898. Who fears to speak of Derry, Aughrim, and the Boyne? Papists, stand aside! We conquered you before, and can do so again. Our motto still is: Down with Home Rule, Hurrah for King William, and to Hell with the Pope!”