A lady has recently drawn my attention to a footnote in Mr. Lecky’s History of Ireland, where is quoted from a letter of my ancestor, Colonel Maurice Hussey, the following opinion:—­

’It—­i.e.  Tralee—­was a nest of thieves and smugglers, and so it always will be until nine parts of ten of O’Donoghue’s old followers be proclaimed and hanged on gibbets on the spot.’

So when O’Donoghues have troubled me, it is a case of history repeating itself, and if the percentage of the followers of the modern chieftain had been ’removed’—­as the modern phrase in Ireland ran—­according to the manner advocated by my ancestor, I could have voted in Parliament against dismembering the Empire to gratify the eagerness of an old man to truckle to the traitors of the country intrusted to his care.

CHAPTER XI

DRINK

Of course one of the great troubles in Ireland is drink.  I am no advocate for teetotalism, for I think a man who can enjoy a moderate glass is a better one than his brother who has to drink water in order that he may not yield to the overpowering ’tempitation’—­to quote Mr. Huntley Wright—­to get drunk!  But for my fellow-countrymen I can see that drink is a terrible curse, one which is the cause of half the crime, half the illness, and more than half the misery that exists there.

Of all Irish benefactors, possibly Father Mathew was the greatest; but in my boyish days, when it became known that men, not yet in a lunatic asylum, had taken up the notion that human life was possible without alcoholic drinks, the wits of Kerry and Cork were heartily diverted at the bare idea.

It used to be the stock joke after dinner, even when Father Mathew was in the zenith of his triumph.

In Cork if you laugh at a thing you can generally suppress it, for, whereas all Irishmen are keenly susceptible to ridicule, the Cork folk are even more so.

The cold water business furnished endless jests, but it survived them.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all was the clergyman who preached against it as being irreligious, taking as the text of his sermon, ‘Wine, that maketh glad the heart of man.’

I like a man who is disinterested, therefore I wish to remind the present generation that Father Mathew came of a stock of distillers, and his family was among the first to suffer by his preaching.

It was probable there would be a reaction after his death; and when that event took place, after the famine and fever, none really took his place to warn the diminishing population, in sufficiently effective fashion, of all the ills that drink was laying up for them.

Wherever, in my work, I found Government relief works, within a stone’s throw of every pay office a whisky shop started into operation.

New Ireland arose from the famine, and she has never since shown much sign of temperance.  Indeed, an excessive amount of money is, and has ever since then been, spent on liquor in Ireland.