The drink problem is the hardest to solve in Great Britain, England, Ireland and Scotland. It is worse than the wage problem or the land problem. In no other countries that I have visited are the evils of booze so plainly in evidence as in the British Isles. In Germany the sight of the family in the beer garden with their mugs of creamy liquid, their good-nature and their temperance, does not make an unpleasant impression. In France and the southern countries, where wine is the common beverage, one does not worry about this custom. But in England, Ireland and Scotland, where you see men and women drunk in the streets and in the gutters, where you see children ragged and barefooted, homes cheerless and pauperism prevalent, all plainly because of the drink, the sensibility of even the most seasoned is shocked. Public-houses with women behind the bars, open seven days in the week and handing out the whisky which temporarily exhilarates and then stupefies and degrades, are one of the companion pictures to the great buildings, wonderful achievements and artistic developments which one sees in every British town. The temperance societies work hard, the government would help if it dared, but the drinking, the suffering and the pauperizing process goes on. The distilleries are enlarging, and working nights.
I talked this matter over with an intelligent Irishman, and he agreed with me that if the drinking of liquor could be abolished it would do away with nine-tenths of the poverty. “But see these poor fellows and how they work,” he said. “Saturday night comes, and who can blame them for having a few pleasant hours even if it is all imagination, and even if they do go to work on blue Monday with aching heads and a little tremble.”
Which is very poor argument, for it does not take in the dependent wives and children. And the Saturday night drunk makes a poor workman on Monday.
On the northern coast of Ireland, near Portrush and a number of beautiful summer resorts, is the Giant’s Causeway. The origin of this really wonderful freak of nature is said by archæologists to be volcanic, and that the Causeway, the adjoining cliffs and several islands are products that came from a volcano in the shape of burning lava, and were then thrown into shape by later explosions as the molten mass was cooling. The Causeway is a formation like a pier extending into the ocean and made up of 40,000 pillars (by Irish count), each a separate column and usually five-or six-sided. They are about twenty feet long, twenty inches in diameter and jointed like mason-work, or more like a bamboo rod. The theory is that as the lava cooled it cracked and shrunk. Perhaps so. Nobody saw it.
I prefer the Irish version, which is simpler and easy to understand.
Fin MacCoul, the giant, was the champion of Ireland. He had knocked out all rivals and no one could stand in front of him for a second round. He was as great a man in Ireland as John L. Sullivan used to be in Boston. Over in Scotland a certain Caledonia giant boasted that he could lick any man on earth, Irish preferred. He gave out an interview to the newspapers, saying that if it were not for the wetting he would cross over and take the Irish championship from Fin. After much of the usual mouth-work between the champions, Fin got permission from the king, constructed the Causeway from Ireland to Scotland, and dared the Caledonian to come across. The Scot was game, and the match was pulled off without police interference, resulting in a victory for Fin, who kindly allowed his beaten rival to settle in Ireland and open a saloon. Ireland was then, as it is now, the finest country in the world, so the Scotchman lived happily ever afterward. The Causeway gradually sank into the sea, and all that is now in sight is the Irish end and a few islands between it and the Scottish coast.