the enforcement of laws that are already on the statute books,
especially the Sunday closing act and the law which forbids the sale of
liquor to minors. Another object is to encourage the formation of
temperance clubs throughout the country, to organize opposition to
applications for licenses, to promote meetings, to educate the people as
to the evils of the liquor traffic, and to create public sentiment
against it. It also has committees to encourage the establishment of
restaurants at which liquor is not sold, to encourage healthful
recreation, and to provide local amusements that will keep the men out
of the public houses.
The president of the council is a Roman Catholic barrister; the
secretary is a Quaker; the vice-presidents include all of the Roman
Catholic and all of the Church of Ireland archbishops and several
bishops of both denominations, the president of the Methodist
conference, the president of the Maynooth College (Roman Catholic), the
provost of Trinity College, the moderator of the Presbyterian general
assembly, several earls and other members of the nobility, the leaders
of the Irish party in parliament, and several other gentlemen of equal
prominence and influence.
"The Church of Ireland has a very strong organization," said Mr. Wigham,
"but, of course, it is not so strong or so extensive as that of the
Roman Catholics, because they constitute at least three-fourths of the
population of Ireland. The Presbyterians and Methodists are also well
organized and have a temperance society in every parish and connected
with every chapel. Our central organization is supported by them all,
and is entirely nonsectarian, as you will perceive upon examining our
list of officers.
"Nearly all the temperance work in Ireland is done by religious
organizations, and whatever may be the differences of the denominational
leaders over theology and other matters, they are united and harmonious
in their opposition to the liquor traffic. I should say that the
influence of Maynooth College is greater than that of any other
institution. The temperance sentiment under the influence of President
Mannix is very strong there, and the students have a society called 'The
Pioneers,' the members of which take a pledge that they will abstain
from all intoxicating liquors during their entire life. No man can join
'The Pioneers' until after two years of probation, in order that he may
take the vows with his eyes wide open and with plenty of reflection; but
more than two-thirds of the priests that come out of that institution
are 'Pioneers.'
"There has been a decided change in the habits of the priesthood of
Ireland during the last generation or two. Formerly it was not
considered improper, and, indeed, it was customary, for a priest to set
out a bottle and a glass for the refreshment of all visitors of
importance, and his parishioners would feel very much mortified if they
could not offer similar hospitality to the priest when he came to see
them. It was common for a priest to have wine and whisky on his table
and to linger with the rest of the guests at a dinner party when the
ladies had left the dining-room. But that is the exception nowadays.
Those customs are obsolete and most of the priests would as soon think
of offering a dose of poison to a parishioner as to hand him a bottle of
liquor. The old-fashioned rollicking parson has entirely disappeared
from both the Roman Catholic church and the Church of Ireland, and the
priesthood is at present composed almost entirely of earnest, devout
men, who abstain entirely from liquor and try to promote habits of
temperance among their parishioners. A majority of the bishops have
forbidden the use of liquor at wakes and will not allow anything
stronger than tea on those occasions. A majority of them will not
confirm a child that will not take a pledge of total abstinence until it
is twenty-one years of age. Some of them put the limit at twenty-five. A
great work is also being done by the Jesuits, the Capuchins, and the
Franciscans, who have been asked by the bishops recently to co-operate
in a great propaganda that is to include the entire island.
"Dr. Walsh, the archbishop of Dublin, and other archbishops, have
recently undertaken to secure the closing of all saloons on St.
Patrick's day, and it is proposed to boycott the publicans who keep open
doors. Last year Archbishop Walsh published a pastoral in his diocese in
which he said, 'In certain districts, not a few of the licensed houses
for the sale of intoxicating drinks are still kept open on that day.
This continues to be done, although a number of the proprietors of
licensed houses, indeed the majority of them, closed their
establishments in honor of the holy festival of our national apostle. In
so doing they did their part toward securing the observance of the
national holy day that should not be marred by intemperance among the
people. It is lamentable that the efforts thus made in so good a cause
should be frustrated to a large extent by the selfish actions of those
members of the licensed trade who are setting the healthy public opinion
of the city at defiance and seem to make the praiseworthy action of
others an occasion of profit to themselves. A vigorous combined effort
should be made by the clergy to secure a general closing of licensed
houses on St. Patrick's day.'
"This patriotic action of Dr. Walsh has had a decided effect upon the
celebration of St. Patrick's day," continued Mr. Wigham, "and it is now
more of a religious festival than an occasion for carousing. Several
other bishops have taken the same stand with similar results.
"The labor party has also taken an advanced position in favor of
temperance legislation," continued Mr. Wigham. "At the annual meeting of
the labor unions last year a resolution was adopted in favor of local
option. The resolutions declare that 'the liquor traffic is a frightful
source of poverty, crime, and lunacy,' and demand a law 'giving the
inhabitants of every locality the right to veto any applications for
either the renewal of existing licenses or the granting of new ones,
seeing that public houses are generally situated in thickly populated
working class districts.'
"The vote on the adoption of this resolution was 666,000 against
103,000.
"The local option bill now pending before parliament applies to England
only," continued Mr. Wigham. "It does not affect Ireland, but we expect
to see the passage of a law prohibiting liquor to be taken from the
premises on which it is sold and also forbidding a man to use the wages
of his wife and children or to pawn the property of his family for
drink."
"What is the drink bill of Ireland?" I asked, and in reply Mr. Wigham
gave me the following table showing the total expenditure and the _per
capita_ expenditure of the people of Ireland for liquor annually for the
last six years:
Total. Per capita.
1902 £14,257,751 £3 4s 5d
1903 14,311,034 3 4s 10d
1904 13,816,318 3 2s 10d
1905 13,340,472 3 0s 10d
1906 13,787,970 3 2s 10d
1907 13,991,314 3 3s 10d
The consumption of liquors in Ireland last year was as follows:
Distilled spirits (gallons) 2,391,595
Beer (barrels) 4,574,263
Wine (gallons) 92,465
Other liquors (gallons) 25,000
---------
Total 7,083,323
Average gallons per capita 1,614
"The people of Ireland are drinking less spirits," continued Mr. Wigham,
"and more beer. Ten years ago, for example, they consumed 4,713,178
gallons of spirits, which has been reduced to 2,391,595. During the same
time the consumption of beer has increased from 2,903,915 barrels to
4,574,263 barrels.
"Last year, by the official statistics, the Guinness brewery in Dublin
produced 2,136,629 barrels of beer and other malt liquors, and paid
£2,092,000 duty to the government, an average of £3,000 a day. Alsopps
Company produced 1,125,178 barrels, another company 887,175 barrels,
still another 827,997 barrels; so you see that the manufacture of malt
liquors is very large and is increasing. Some people consider this a
great improvement, but it is still very harmful, and it is a startling
fact that the population of Ireland pay more money for whisky and beer
than they pay for rents or for food or for clothing. The total income of
the population of Ireland is given at £70,000,000, and, as you have seen
from the table I have given you, they spent last year £13,991,314 for
intoxicating drinks."
The Guinness brewery is the largest establishment of the kind in the
world. The buildings cover fifty acres of ground; 3,240 men are employed
in them, and 10,000 people are dependent upon the wages paid. The
brewery was founded in 1759 by an ancestor of the present owner, and did
a purely local business until 1825, when the managers began to seek
trade in England and Scotland. They undertook to secure a foreign market
in 1860. At present the foreign trade is much larger than local
consumption. Last year the total sales amounted to 76,540,000 gallons,
which is an average of nearly two gallons _per capita_ for every
man, woman, and child in the kingdom. An average of 3,600 barrels
of stout are produced daily in one brewery and a new brewery has a
capacity of 2,100 barrels daily. The duty paid in 1907 was more than
$10,000,000--one-fourteenth of the entire revenue collected on liquor in
the United Kingdom. The cold storage capacity of the establishment is
200,000 hogsheads of beer of fifty-two gallons each. One vat will hold
1,700 hogsheads. The main warehouse contains an average of 1,000,000
bushels of malt and similar amounts of other supplies are required. From
eight to ten thousand empty casks arrive at the wharf of Guinness & Co.
daily, chiefly from London, where all the beer, ale, stout, and porter
is sent by steamer in the wood to be bottled, and the fifteen hundred
new casks, required each week, are supplied by cooper shops on the
premises. The life of a cask averages ten years.
Although there is a deplorable amount of intemperance in Ireland, and
according to the estimates of those who have made a study of that
subject, at least one-fifth of the earnings of the people are spent for
liquor, there is comparatively little crime. If the offenses growing out
of the land troubles were deducted the criminal statistics would be very
small and Ireland would rank, with Switzerland, Norway, and Denmark,
among the most orderly and peaceful countries on the globe.
It may be said also that in comparison with the United States the
criminal statistics are very much in favor of Ireland. For example,
during the year 1906 there were only four murders in Ireland to eleven
in the District of Columbia, and only eleven assaults with dangerous
weapons in Ireland to fifty-three in the District of Columbia. During
the year 1907 there were eight murders in Ireland and eighteen in the
District of Columbia and only seventeen assaults with dangerous weapons
in Ireland to fifty-one in the District of Columbia, notwithstanding the
difference in population. The population of Ireland is 4,398,565, and
that of the District of Columbia is 317,380.
During the year 1905 there were 9,728 persons indicted for crimes in
Ireland; in 1906 the total was 9,465, and in 1907 it was 9,418, or 2.2
per 1,000 of the population. The same ratio is reported for 1897, and
the average for the ten years was 2.5 per 1,000.
During the year 1906 there were 372 persons indicted for crime in the
District of Columbia, or 1.17 per 1,000 of population, and in 1907 there
were 381 indictments, or 1.20 per 1,000.
During the year 1906 there were 4,922 indictments found in Chicago (Cook
County), with a population of 2,166,055, or less than one-half that of
Ireland, the ratio to population being 2.27 per 1,000. For the year 1907
there were 4,699 indictments found in Chicago, which was 2.16 per 1,000
of the population.
In Ireland, however, at least one-fifth, and usually more of the
indictments, are for cattle driving, for attempts to burn crops,
hayricks, and stables, for killing and maiming cattle, and for writing
threatening letters. The authorities are very severe in their efforts to
suppress the land troubles, and sometimes half the population of a
village will be indicted for using popular methods of persuasion to
compel the large landowners to sell their farms. A great many
threatening letters are written, for which there is a heavy penalty, and
when some ranchman who has refused to divide up his pastures into farms
and sell them to the "landless" finds his fences broken down and his
cattle scattered all over the country, every suspected person is
indicted for moral effect. There are very few convictions. The people
who are engaged in the outrage will not testify against each other and
there are no other witnesses.
In Ireland there are very few cases of robbery or burglary. Petty
larceny is the principal item in the list of offenses. Grand larceny,
embezzlement, forgery, and similar crimes are infrequent.
The largest buildings in the county towns of Ireland are workhouses,
almshouses, and insane asylums, and they are always well filled. I
visited an insane asylum at Killarney, which is an enormous building,
well arranged and equipped with all modern conveniences, under the
direction of Dr. Edward Griffin, and surrounded by a beautiful garden
and hedges in the midst of an estate of sixty acres. It was opened in
1852. The number of inmates in 1908 was 619, of whom 299 were women and
320 men. During the last six or seven years the number of women has
largely increased. The average age of the inmates is about thirty years.
There are more young men than old men in the institution. Dr. Griffin
told me that many causes lead to insanity. Whisky, however, has little
to do with the condition of the inmates. In 1907 only five men and two
women were there for that cause. Tea has a large number of victims,
destroying the nervous system by excessive use. The largest proportion
come from the country districts, especially from the seacoast,
comparatively few from the towns and cities. The greatest number are of
the farming and laboring classes, who made up three-fourths of the
inmates received last year--common laborers and poor farmers with two
acres of land and two cows. Those from certain districts are generally
related, predisposition to insanity being manifest in many families. The
farming class, coming from the moors and mountains with their barren
soil and great privations, are inclined to insanity because of their
impoverished conditions of life. Their only food is often tea, bread,
and tobacco. The first treatment at the asylum is to give them plenty of
nourishing food and build them up. They are furnished meat every day
except Friday. Religious delusions have disturbed the minds of many who
fear that they are damned forever and cannot enter heaven. They are hard
to cure and the slowest of recovery. The influence of the chaplain in
these cases is most beneficial. Under his ministration they receive
temporary consolation, but after he has left they often relapse into
their former melancholy.
The principal cause of insanity among those who come from the barren
moors and desolate mountains is not so much their isolated condition or
impoverished life, but their strange delusions. The mountain peasants
are very superstitious and imaginative. They believe in fairies and
bogies and hear strange voices in the air around them. They believe in
leprecawns, which are little men that come out of the ground. They
imagine that the fairies and goblins can come through the key-holes of
their rooms in the asylum; they are ever hearing strange voices and
seeing strange specters as they did upon the moors and mountains.
Of both men and women now in the institution at Killarney more than two
hundred have come back to Ireland after a sojourn in America. The
superintendent says that the dissipations and excitement of their
experience in the United States have caused their mental breakdown after
the quiet life and habits of the early days in Ireland. But hereditary
predisposition exists in almost every case and in time would have caused
the same affliction even though they had remained at home. Hereditary
influence and generations of poverty and privation are the general
causes of insanity. Very few recoveries are found among those who have
been born of insane parents. Most of those dismissed are soon back
again, broken down as before by poor nourishment, poverty, and want. The
number of readmissions is very large. There are two chaplains, one of
whom is Rev. Mr. Madden of the Protestant Church of Ireland. There are
very few Protestant patients, however, only twenty being in the asylum
at present, the population of the district being largely Roman Catholic.
The Roman Catholic chaplain, Rev. D. O'Connor, is in constant
attendance.
XXVIII
THE EDUCATION OF IRISH FARMERS
In connection with the breaking up of the big estates into small farms
and the introduction throughout Ireland of the system of peasant
proprietorship, the government has wisely provided for the education of
the farmers so that they may enjoy a larger reward for their labors.
There was some scientific farming on the large estates, but until
recently 95 per cent of the tenants throughout the country have been
simply scratching the land to raise a few potatoes and vegetables to
supply their tables and "laving the pig to pay the rint," as the saying
goes. But now things are different. A department of agriculture has been
organized, in some respects upon the lines of that in the United States,
and after frequent consultation between Sir Horace Plunkett, who was the
leader of the movement, and our own Secretary Wilson at Washington. The
question of agricultural education was taken up seriously, and what is
known as the "recess committee," formed by Sir Horace Plunkett, during
the winter of 1896, suggested a definite plan. The committee consisted
of himself, Lord Mayo, Lord Monteagle, John Redman, T.P. Gill, and
others.
They presented to the government a project for state aid toward the
development of agriculture and mechanical industries with a minister
responsible to parliament in charge, assisted by two councils--one for
agriculture, the other for technical instruction, composed of gentlemen
in touch with public opinion and familiar with the weaknesses and the
requirements of the farmers and the small manufacturers. The act was
passed by parliament in 1899 and a capital sum of $1,000,000 and an
annual appropriation of $830,000 was made for its support.
The department was promptly organized with Sir Horace Plunkett, the
leader of the movement, at its head, and various other branches of the
public administration not originally contemplated were placed under his
jurisdiction, including the quarantine of animals, the regulation of
railway freights on agricultural products, county fairs and markets, the
enforcement of the pure food and drugs laws, the fisheries, the
collection and publication of statistics, the suppression of frauds in
weights and in the sale of agricultural requirements and products, the
colleges of science and art, the art galleries, the Royal Museum and
library, and all technical education throughout the island. The
department very naturally took up first the work of aiding the
development and introducing improvements in agriculture, horticulture,
forestry, dairying, the breeding of horses, cattle, sheep, swine,
poultry, and bees; the protection of game and fish, the cultivation of
flax, home and cottage industries, such as spinning, weaving,
lace-making, and similar household arts; the improvement of cooking and
household economy, nursing, and various other occupations and industries
pertaining to the common people and of the utmost importance for their
health, happiness, and prosperity.
An advisory council of one hundred and four members was formed, composed
mostly of landowners and farmers, with a few merchants and clergymen,
including the bishops of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church
of Ireland, and a board of technical instruction of a similar character,
with several professional educators, the provost of Trinity College, the
Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, and representatives of the clergy
of the Presbyterian and other nonconformist churches.
After considering the problem of technical education, which had never
been undertaken in Ireland to any extent, it was decided to commence by
introducing ordinary instruction in the common schools, and the sum of
$275,000 has annually been distributed, in proportion to population,
among the various counties to train children in the secondary schools of
the rural towns in trades and in the simple principles of the
cultivation of the soil, the breeding of cattle, and other practical
duties of farming life. In order to qualify teachers to give this
instruction summer schools were established at Dublin, Belfast, Cork,
and other central points, and in the cities evening schools were
provided for those who could make use of them. Faculties of experts were
employed for all these schools, and inspectors were sent about the
island inquiring into the methods and reporting upon the competency of
the teachers.
The Metropolitan School of Art and the Royal College of Science, which
have been in existence at Dublin for many years, were re-organized on a
practical basis, inspired with new vitality, and brought into full
activity for the instruction of young men and women in various forms of
arts and handicrafts which were practiced by their ancestors for
centuries, but have long since been lost sight of or neglected. The
Science and Art Museum on Kildare Street, which was seldom visited
except by tourists, is now a live place, and every morning is filled
with young men and women eager to learn lace-making, designing,
decorating, and other arts and industries which have been allowed to
languish in Ireland.
In connection with these schools instruction is given in domestic
economy, in the chemistry of cooking, in nursing, in dressmaking,
millinery, laundry work, and various other branches of domestic economy
which have never before been taught in Ireland. For the benefit of those
who cannot attend these schools twenty-nine itinerant instructors are
sent throughout the country to give instruction to the wives and
daughters of farmers and laborers, how to make the best use of foods and
how to practice other economies in household administration; how to
raise poultry and bees, do cottage gardening, the culture and the
preserving of fruit, and other practical domestic sciences.
This is something entirely new in Ireland, and the reports of the
itinerant instructors and of the inspectors who have followed them to
observe their work have been most encouraging as regards the interest
taken by the younger women and girls and the improvement that has
already been made in the conditions of the households of the working
classes in the country, for these efforts are confined to the rural
districts. There has been some attempt at reforming the sanitary
conditions of the tenement houses of Dublin and other cities, but they
have scarcely gone beyond the experimental stage, for the task is
greater than the department would dare undertake at present.