rely so much on holding up your fingers and making faces. We have been
for so many weeks among the Dutch and the French that it is a positive
pleasure to just listen to the conversation around us and know that we
can understand. A little knowledge of a foreign tongue leads to many
mistakes. I heard a Frenchman in a London hotel giving an account of
his day’s experience to an English lady. Among other things he said he
went to a linen store and left an order for table linen, and added,
“and I will have my entrails on it.” Of course he meant his initials,
but he had been careless with his dictionary. And yet it is very hard
for us to understand the ordinary London cab-driver or workman. His
accent is so different that it is almost like another language. And
even an educated Englishman will give you a direction like this: “Go
to the next turning on the left, bear a bit to the right until you
get to the top of the street.” Which means in American go to the next
corner, turn to the left, then a little to the right to the end of the
street. I never can understand why the English people generally murder
their language as they do. But perhaps I am like the little American
girl I met in Germany. She had learned German at home, and I asked her
how she got along in Berlin. “Not very well,” she said, “they talk such
bad German.”
* * * * *
The transportation in the center of London is confined entirely to
busses and cabs. There is too much traffic and the streets are too
narrow for street railways. In the outer parts of the city a number
of street cars, or “trams” as they are called, are operated. Every
bus and every tram has seats on the roof, and they are the choice
seats on the vehicle. From one of these top seats is the place to see
London, and the traveler has the advantage of not only being able
to note the sights on the pavement and the walks, but he can look
in the second-story windows and see how people live. There are no
great skyscrapers in London, the business houses usually being six
stories or less in height. The residences are nearly always three
or four stories, and either built flush to the street, with a garden
or court in the rear, or back from the street and the yard inclosed
by a high stone wall. The Englishman goes on the old principle that
an Englishman’s house is his castle, and puts up high walls between
himself and his neighbors. A front porch, or an open lawn in front
of a private house, would be regarded as freakish or an evidence of
insanity. On the other hand, there are many public parks and pretty
green squares in London which are breathing-spots for the congestion of
humanity within this great city.
The “City of London” which has a Lord Mayor is the little old city
which is the hub of the whole business. It is the section of the
banks and the great institutions of finance, and is about the size of
Hutchinson, but a solid mass of stone structures and narrow streets.
Only about 30,000 people reside there. The London of the present is
London County, covers about 900 square miles and is therefore about the
size of Reno county. That is the area in which 8,000,000 people live.
It is governed by a County Council, elected by the taxpayers, which is
a very active body and is doing much to improve the conditions. London
has fine water and visitors are even urged to drink it--something new
in Europe. Taxes, or “rates” as they are called, are high, and include
everything from real estate and personal to income tax and a stamp tax
on receipts and drafts. The great problem of improving a city is to get
the money without distressing the people. It requires large sums to
make and care for parks, streets, schools, paving, water-works, light,
and the other things that the city must have in order to be modern,
healthful, and comfortable. The citizens everywhere groan under the
weight of taxation, and yet they should not if the money is properly
spent. These streets, police, schools, fire departments and such are as
necessary as the walls of our homes, which also require money to build
and maintain. The certainty of death and taxes is proverbial. There is
no way to avoid the former and the only way to dodge taxes is to go
to an uninhabited island and live by yourself. And then if some other
individual comes along, the first thing the original tax-dodger will
do is to tax the other fellow.
* * * * *
The ordinary English home has the front room of the house for the
dining-room. The “drawing-room” is at the rear and the kitchen quite a
distance from the dining-room. The drawing-room is used only on special
occasions and the dining-room is the family living-room. The English
are great home-makers, and their houses are always well furnished and
look as if folks lived there. On the continent the fashion is to go out
for the evening meal to restaurant or café, but the Englishman comes
home and stays there. The table is spread with the family and intimate
friends around, and supper is served at 8 o’clock or later. You see the
Englishman has already had three meals--breakfast, luncheon, and tea;
so the evening meal is late. To me the most attractive part of English
life is that in the home. The Englishman gathers his family about him,
pulls down the blinds, reads his newspaper and is in his castle, which
no lord or duke can enter without his consent. This simple virtue of
home-living is rare in Europe, and in the family circle which gathers
at the table and at the altar the young Englishman gets the habit of
thought and manner which marks him wherever he goes, and which has made
his country the greatest of all the nations.
The North of Ireland
LONDONDERRY, IRELAND, September 8.
Crossing the Irish Sea from Fishguard in southern Wales to Rosslare in
southern Ireland, I met a jolly Irishman from Cork. When I told him I
was going to the North of Ireland he remonstrated. “Don’t do it, mon.
Every Irishman up there is a Scotchman!” But I had seen the beautiful
South of Ireland and we had to come to Londonderry to take the ship
for home, so the warning of the Corker was in vain. I found that he
was right. Soon after we left Dublin we came upon linen factories and
distilleries and Presbyterian churches, people too busy to jolly a
stranger, and cannily seeking the surest way to a sixpence. In the
South of Ireland no one is too busy to talk with the stranger and to
tell him all the legendary lore of the country, while in the North one
shrinks from stopping the busy worker, even to ask him which way is
straight up. The people of both ends of Ireland are pleasant and the
American dollar is greatly admired, but the process of extracting it
is painless, even pleasant, in Cork, while it hurts enough to notice in
Belfast. The South is almost entirely agricultural and is social, while
the North is filled with factories and notices not to allow your heads
to stick out of the windows. The people of the South are poorer but
happier; the people of the North are busier and more worried in their
looks. The Irishman in the South smiles pleasantly without an apparent
thought of the money he is going to make, the Irishman in the North
smiles after he gets the money.
* * * * *
All of this Emerald isle is green, and picturesque scenery with lakes
and falls, glens and fields, rugged coasts and beautiful beaches is to
be found from Queenstown to Portrush.
* * * * *
We stopped a day in Dublin, which is an Irish city with a large tinge
of English. It was the capital of Ireland prior to the consolidation
of the Irish Parliament with that of Great Britain, and may still be
called so because the Lord-Lieutenant Governor lives here and has a
sort of a court. There are about 400,000 people, packed in too tightly
and with not enough work to keep many of them in decent living and
style. That is the trouble in Ireland--one of their troubles, the lack
of opportunity for work. There is not much for the energetic young
Irishman to do but to emigrate, and he goes to America or Canada or
Australia, or even to England, to get a job and a chance. The land is
nearly all owned by men who do not live in Ireland, and is rented to
farmers who find that when they improve their places it means a raise
in rent. The new land law which gives a man a sort of title to his
leased land, and makes a court of arbitration as to rent and purchase,
is improving conditions in Ireland and they are better off now in
respect to land than they are in England, except for the blight of
absentee landlordism, the system which takes the rent-money and spends
it in London or in Paris.
* * * * *
Dublin is perking up some on the prospect of home rule, which would
bring an Irish legislature to Dublin and make the city a real capital.
But the prospect for home rule is dubious. The Irish party holds the
balance of power in the English Parliament and has been allied with
the Liberals in their reforms and the dehorning of the House of Lords.
The Liberals have promised the Irish home rule, and the leaders will
try to fulfill the promise, but they may find it hard work to line up
their followers, and let it go until another general election. There
are so many other questions involved in English politics that home rule
may be lost in the shuffle, but as the Irish are the best politicians
in the world they are looking forward to success after a lovely fight.
* * * * *
The city of Belfast, a hundred miles north of Dublin, is the center of
the linen trade. The English Parliament a couple of hundred years ago
prohibited the manufacture of wool in Ireland because it competed with
English trade, but promoted the spinning of linen. The climate is just
right, labor is cheap, and Irish linen is the best in the world. We
visited a linen mill, and also a cottage where the hand looms were at
work. The wages paid to good hands are 50 to 75 cents a day. This would
be fair wages in Europe, but the work is not always steady and many
days are lost in setting the patterns and fixing the looms. The manager
of the factory said that most of his best men went to America--he
himself had two sons in New York. The wages here will keep soul and
body together if the body is willing to get along on fish and potatoes.
But there is no outcome, no prospect of a future which shall include
a beefsteak once a week. The manager had been in America and he knew
the difference. “Our workmen are all right because they don’t know the
luxuries the American workman has, except by hearsay. Of course if they
once get the appetite for meat and a new suit of clothes every year
they have to leave us. But a two-eyed beefsteak makes a good meal.” A
two-eyed beefsteak is an Irish name for a herring.
Belfast has great ship-building yards, next to Glasgow the greatest
in the world. It also has large distilleries which supply England and
America. I am told that the consumption of liquor is on the decrease in
Ireland. I hope so. But the distilleries keep building additions and
enlarging their plants.
Which recalls the old story of the Illinois statesman who was a great
drinker and was ruining the prospect of a useful life. His family
and friends tried to stop him, but the habit or disease could not be
overcome. One night a friend had him out for a walk, trying to sober
him up for important business the next day. They passed a distillery
and the friend said: “John, what a fool you are to try to drink all the
whisky that is made. You can’t do it. See that busy distillery with its
bright lights and throbbing engines. You can’t beat it.” John looked,
and then with drunken dignity replied: “Perhaps you’re right. But don
you shee I’m making ’em work nights?”
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
The formation of the coast for several miles each side of the Causeway
is the same volcanic rock, and it rises abruptly hundreds of feet high
from the sea. Caves and caverns with arches and vaults and echoes, and
natural amphitheatres with the pipe organ Fin used to play and the
bathtub which he used, are visited by the visitors who go out upon
the Atlantic in a row-boat. I have seen Niagara and the Falls of the
Rhine, and the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, and a few hundred more
wonderful works of Nature or of giants, and the Causeway is not second
to any of them.
* * * * *
Our last stop in Ireland is this town of Londonderry, known in Ireland
as “Derry.” The London end of the name was put on by King James the
First, who was so devoted to his religion that he killed or exiled the
Catholic Irish in Ulster and Derry and gave their lands to Protestant
emigrants from England. A few years later Cromwell finished the job
and got the name of “Thorough,” because of his theory that the only
good Irishman was a dead Irishman. There were terrible religious wars
in Ireland for years, each side getting even for outrages committed by
the other. One great event in the series was the siege of Londonderry
by an Irish army under James the Second, who had been run out of
England by William of Orange. James was about to enter the city with
the consent of the governor, when thirteen apprentice boys banged down
the portcullis, closing the entrance. That started the fight, and the
people of Londonderry decided to stand the siege. They repulsed the
soldiers and James tried to starve ’em out. The siege, which began
with no preparation for defense, lasted seven months, and half the
population died of starvation. The people ate dogs and cats and rats,
a rat selling for three shillings. At last an English fleet broke
through the obstruction in the river, and the remnant of the people of
Londonderry was saved.
* * * * *
Those were “good old times.” The Protestants of Londonderry knew if
they surrendered they would meet the same fate that they had accorded
to the Catholics on the capture of Irish towns, and there is hardly
a town in Ireland which cannot duplicate the story of the siege of
Londonderry. Those days are gone, Irish and English have laid aside
their weapons, and except for St. Patrick’s Day or the 12th of July,
which is the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne in which William
defeated James, there is hardly a broken head in the country from
religious causes.
The walls still stand in Londonderry, and some of the cannon of 1689
are mounted at the old stand. But the walls are now a promenade and
the cannon are only relics. A Protestant cathedral and a Catholic
cathedral, a Presbyterian college and a Catholic college, are doing
business side by side, and all are doing good. Two steamship lines have
made Derry a regular stop on their way from Glasgow to America. The
principal business of the town is the manufacture of linen and whisky,
most of which is exported to the United States. And Irishmen from
the North of the isle, who want an opportunity and a chance, come to
Derry on their way to the best land of all, discovered by the Spanish,
developed by the English, and ruled generally by the Irish, known and
loved as home now by more Irish than are in Ireland, the U. S. A.
Scotland and the Scotch
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND, September 7.
Scotland is one of the oldest countries of the civilized world.
Although it is now united with England and is a part of Great
Britain, up to two hundred years ago it had nothing to do with the
English except to fight them. The original inhabitants were Celts,
and came into history as Picts and Scots, who held possession of
the northern part of the country when the Romans conquered England.
After the Romans went away the Saxons arrived and practically wiped
out all the old Britons in England, but made no headway against the
Caledonians or “people of the hills,” as they called the residents
of the north. About the ninth century the various tribes were gotten
together under one chief or king, and from that time until the union
of England and Scotland in 1706 the chief occupation of the Scotch
was to fight the English, who were always trying to conquer Scotland,
but never succeeding. The Scotch and the English were of different
race, language, customs and habits. Much of Scotland, the Highlands,
has little room for agriculture, and the people lived a roving life,
raising a few sheep and oats, and, whenever they felt like it, making
a raid into the Lowlands and into England and bringing back cattle
and supplies to last them until the next raid. They were converted to
Christianity, but their idea of morality never included an injunction
against killing the Lowlander and running off his herd. War was the
name under which nations concealed their crimes of robbery, and the
Highlanders of Scotland had war all the time; so they were officially
justified. When you analyze their romantic history and the great
deeds of their heroes you will always find that no matter how strict
their character and honor among themselves, they never considered it
anything but a praiseworthy action to kill and rob an Englishman. The
reformation by John Knox and his contemporaries filled the Scottish
heads with religious enthusiasm and devotion, but it did not interfere
with the Scottish theory that the English were the natural enemy who
must always be fought. And the English, on their side, reciprocated
the regard in which they were held by the Scotch, and every king
of England who had a chance put in his time trying to conquer the
clansmen. Often the English would defeat the Scotch armies and capture
their chiefs, but they couldn’t any more hold the Scotch territory than
they could hold the red-hot end of a poker.
* * * * *
When Elizabeth, Queen of England, died, the next heir to the English
throne was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, then reigning as James
the Sixth, King of Scotland. He was not only the heir, but he was a
Protestant, and was, therefore, acceptable, and he was duly crowned as
James the First of England. Of course, he went to London to reside, and
from that time to the present England and Scotland have had the same
king, although it was 100 years later before there was any union of
the two governments. In 1706 the Scottish Parliament adopted the act
of union, the majority being secured by shameful and open bribery and
against the protests of the Scottish people, who did not want to be the
tail of the English kite. But the union resulted very beneficially
to Scotland, as it changed the occupation from war to commerce and
from raising hell to raising sheep. The natural shrewdness of the Celt
was stimulated by the industry required in a country where hard work
is necessary, and all over the world Scotchmen are known for their
ability, their keenness in argument, their thrift and their success.
Scotland is as far north as Labrador and Hudson Bay. It has a short
growing season and very little fertile soil. I am wearing an overcoat
and shivering with cold. That kind of a country raises sturdy and
energetic people.
* * * * *
It has rained every day and nearly all the time since we arrived.
The Scotch do not seem to mind the wet, but go about their business,
clad in rough, warm clothing. I had quite a talk with a bright old
Scotchman, and, after I had admitted--just as well give in to a
Scotchman without argument--that Scotland was the most beautiful
country on earth, I started a diversion by asking him if it rained all
the time in Scotland. In very broad dialect he said he would tell
us a story that would answer the question. A ship arrived off the
Scotch coast, and, as it was raining, the captain decided to delay
landing until the storm was over. He waited three weeks before the rain
stopped, but finally the sun came out and he put for the shore. Just as
he climbed onto the land the sky darkened and the rain began to fall
again. Of a Scotch lad standing by, the captain asked: “Does it rain
all the time in Scotland?”
“Naw,” said the lad; “sometimes it snaws.”
* * * * *
The agricultural products of Scotland are oats, grass, barley, and a
little wheat. The farms are generally small and the soil poor, and the
great industry is the raising of sheep. In the manufacturing towns the
wool is made into cloth. The chief industry, aside from this, is the
distillery, and a great deal of the product is consumed at home. The
people are poor, and there is little chance for them to improve their
condition and stay in Scotland. The land is owned by big landlords,
and hundreds of square miles are kept for hunting by the proprietors
of the estates. Work as hard as he may, the Scotch tenant farmer has
very little ahead of him except poverty and heaven. The tourists
bring a good deal of money to the country, and are separated from it
in every way the canny Scot can devise. But in spite of poverty and
notwithstanding the evil of intemperance, there is no doubt of the
natural brightness of the Scotch.
* * * * *