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[170] 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[171] 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[172] 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[173] 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.[174] The very physique of the people bears abundant witness to the circumstance that a diet of pure potato ............