The tourist is the curse of Ireland, as he is the curse of most places. When one comes to consider the enormous number of grievances the Irish and their political figure-heads have managed to rake up, one wonders that the tourist should hitherto have escaped. That he constitutes a grievance, and a grievance which affects seriously the main body of the Irish people, can not be doubted. It is quite obvious, to begin with, that the tourist in Ireland is usually of the hated Sassenach race. Irishmen do not tour in their own country as Englishmen do, or as Scotchmen have been known to do. They have too little money for indulgences of that kind, and if money be plentiful they prefer to visit England or America. The Englishman, however,[159] insists on taking a holiday in Ireland sometime in his life, even though it be only on his honeymoon. So that in the more suitable months the country bristles with tourists, and the great majority of them are English. Secondly, the tourist, being English, is always more or less hilarious, supercilious and aggressive, and these are qualities of which the Irish of all people least like a display, at any rate from an Englishman. Time out of mind the English tourist has been the covert bête noire of the Continental peoples on account of these very traits. An Englishman on the Continent, especially if he be a middle-class Englishman, or a very wealthy Englishman, has a knack of divesting himself utterly of the thin veneer of social decency which he manages to maintain at home. Somehow the air of the Continent exhilarates him to all sorts of posturing and ridiculousness. The vulgarian, the Philistine and the snob in him become greatly emphasized. He can shout aloud, and be rude to everybody,[160] because he believes that nobody understands what he is pleased to call his lingo. Besides which the Englishman on the Continent always believes in his private bosom that he is a philanthropist, a sort of circular-touring benevolence, as it were. “Who is it,” he inquires grandiloquently, “that keeps these pore foreigners going? Why, the English, and the English alone. It is we who bring millions of pounds to their starved, tax-burdened countries. It is we who populate their rapacious hotels and make their seasons for them, and drop our idiot moneys at their gambling tables, and pay francs at the entrances to their art galleries, and climb their rotten mountains, and steam, to soft Lydian airs, up their rivers, and bathe in their lukewarm seas, and tip them and patronize them, and joke with them, and generally afford them opportunities for existence.” This attitude has been noted and laughed at by the cynical, time out of mind; but it can not be eradicated from the Englishman’s fairly[161] comprehensive stock of idiosyncrasies, and it remains to this day typical of the breed. To Ireland the English tourist proceeds focused for pretty well the same view of things. Of course, he is disposed to look upon your Irishman as being rather more of a man and a brother than is the low foreigner. Further, he invariably believes that by a judicious expenditure on “drinks,” coupled with an easy, slap-you-on-the-back but still superior manner, he can extract from the Irishmen with whom he comes in contact the whole secret of the Irish Question. In other words, he makes a point of going to Ireland with his eyes open; so that when he returns he may remark huskily in his club—“Sir, I have visited Ireland, and I know the Irish people through and through. Waiter, a large Scotch, please!” Thus is the altruism of the tourist in Ireland tempered with a taste for inquiry and politics. I suppose that in no country in the world is the tourist allowed so much of his fling as in this same[162] green Erin. For example, in Ireland he takes care to call every man “Pat,” and every woman “Kathleen mavourneen.” If he called a Frenchman “Froggy,” or a German “Johnny Deutscher” he would stand a good chance of getting his nose pulled. But in Ireland a bold peasantry has learned to smile and smile and touch the hat, and take the coppers, and provide the political information for which his honor is gasping without so much as turning a hair. It is not really in the Irish blood to take these traveling mountebanks, with their loud suits and louder manners and louder money, seriously or even indifferently. On the other hand, your true Irish resent in their hearts the entire business. It is their poverty and not their wills which consent; though singularly enough, as I have already said, you will seldom find an Irishman indulging himself in growls about it. And it is this very poverty which might reasonably give rise to the Irishman’s third grievance against the tourist. For an Englishman[163] traveling in Ireland is always a sort of perambulating incitement to envy, because of his apparent wealth. He may be only a clerk out for a fortnight’s “rest and change” on money squeezed out of the meagerest kind of salary; yet to the penniless Irishman he seems literally to be made of wealth. And Pat—let us call him Pat, so that the tourists of this world may know whom we mean—is not without certain reasoning powers of his o............