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.