There is a great deal of drunkenness in Ireland. There is more in Dublin than anywhere else, but not so much as in Scotland. In Ireland a saloon is called “a public house” and a saloon-keeper is called a publican. All liquor selling is done under licenses granted by the justices of the peace upon petitions signed by the people of the community in which the saloon is to be located. There is no limit to the number of licenses; and there seems to be no particular rule about granting them, except that the fee of one pound must be paid annually. A license once granted is perpetual as long as the annual fee is paid and the police do not show cause why it should be revoked. Licenses are held chiefly by ordinary merchants, at what we would call country stores, by the wayside, at “four corners,” where the peasants go to trade, and along highways frequented by teamsters, jaunting cars, bicyclers, and other people with vehicles. The publican usually puts a watering trough in front of his place, and thus affords refreshment for man and beast. In most of the rural districts licenses are held in families and handed down from generation to generation of storekeepers, who keep bottles on the shelves and manage to sell enough liquor to pay the fees. If the business is sold or inherited the license goes with the place, and many have been running for a hundred years or more.

Until recently anyone could get a license by obtaining a few signatures of political influence, but a recent act of parliament prohibits the issue of new licenses except for hotels, genuine clubs, and new villages of a certain population. The effect of this legislation will be to gradually reduce the number of liquor sellers and prevent the extension of the traffic except as new towns may be started, which is not common in Ireland, as it is in the United States.

In the five principal cities of Ireland, Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, and Waterford, special licenses are necessary, and the fees vary from one pound to sixty pounds per year, according to the amount of business done. There are “six-day licenses” and “seven-day licenses.” The latter permit liquor selling between two and five o’clock on Sunday afternoons and require an additional fee. The Sunday closing law is said to be well enforced throughout all Ireland, but in Dublin crowds of men and women can be seen standing around the “publics” during the open hours on Sunday afternoons.

For the year ending March 31, 1907, a total of 23,835 licenses were issued in Ireland, of which 17,496 were granted to publicans, 2,510 to wholesale dealers, and 1,022 to wholesale grocers who handle wine, beer, and spirits to be consumed off the premises; and 2,807 special licenses were issued for temporary privileges.

The public houses show a slight decrease. Ten years ago, in 1898, there were 17,407 licenses granted for them; in 1900 there were 17,596; in 1903 there were 17,749; in 1905 there were 17,571, and in 1907 there were 17,496, or an average of one to every 250 people. The licenses for the wholesale and grocery traffic also remain about the same.

W.R. Wigham, a Quaker, who is secretary of the Irish Association for the Prevention of Intemperance, told me that there is less private drinking and less habitual drinking in Ireland than is generally supposed. The Irish are a convivial people, but comparatively few men or women drink for the love of the liquor. Most of the drunkenness is seen at the fairs and cattle sales, the festivals and wakes, although the use of liquor at the latter has been forbidden by the bishops and is now much less frequent than formerly.

In England and Scotland drinking is more regular and general for the sake of the stimulant, while an Irishman very seldom drinks alone. In order to lessen intemperance from conviviality an anti-treating movement was started a few years ago. It was popularly known as “The League of the Lonely Pint,” and for a couple of years was quite successful, but it did not last.

The quantity of spirituous liquors consumed in Ireland is much less than in England or Scotland because the population is less, but the average is greater than in Scotland. The per capita consumption in England for 1906 of alcoholic liquors was 2,090 gallons, in Scotland, 1,430 gallons, and in Ireland 1,614 gallons.

The drink bill per capita is less in Ireland. Taking all liquors into the calculation the expenditure per capita for liquor in England last year was £3 19s. 9d., in Scotland £3 3s. 1d., and in Ireland £3 2s. 10d.

The number of arrests for drunkenness and for crimes and offenses which may be attributed to liquor have been decreasing in Ireland for several years. In 1902 in all Ireland, 80,054 men and 11,163 women, making a total of 91,217, were arrested for drunkenness. In 1906 the figures were 68,656 men and 8,606 women, making a total of 77,262. This is a decrease of 11,398 men and 2,557 women and a total decrease of 13,955 in four years.

In 1902 one person out of forty-eight was arrested for drunkenness in Ireland, in 1906 one in fifty-eight, which is a decided improvement; but think of 8,000 and 11,000 women being arrested for drunkenness!

The number of arrests for assault during the year 1907 in all Ireland was less than ever before, being only 16,055, in comparison with 24,027 in 1896, 22,065 in 1900, and 16,666 in 1904, while the number of persons arrested for disorderly conduct decreased from 90,233 to 77,262 during the same years. There is a terrible side to the picture. Of the women arrested for drunkenness in Ireland last year more than one thousand were under twenty-one years of age, 118 between sixteen and eighteen years of age, while 156 were over sixty.

The Sunday law is pretty well enforced, and during the last year, outside of the five principal cities, 2,289 persons were arrested for its violation. That is about the average for the last ten years.

In Dublin there has been a decided falling off in the arrests for drunkenness on Sunday; the total in 1898 was 1,280, while in 1907 it was only 404. The number of arrests for drunkenness on Sunday in Cork decreased from 265 to 193 during the same period, and those in Belfast from 537 to 434.

In the city of Dublin alone 1,772 women were arrested for drunkenness in 1907 and 2,941 men. In 1904, 1,976 women were arrested for drunkenness.

I don’t suppose there is any city in the world where there is so much drunkenness among women as there is in Dublin, except it be Glasgow and Edinburgh, although the number of drunken men arrested is not so much larger than the average in other cities of Europe and the United States. And what is even more lamentable, the public is so hardened to the repulsive spectacle that it does not attract as much curiosity as the appearance of an ordinary drunken man upon the streets of Chicago or New York. Women stagger from the doors of saloons along the sidewalks with disheveled hair and disordered garments without attracting any attention whatsoever.

The Roman Catholic clergy are doing a great deal to suppress disorder and promote temperance by prohibiting the use of liquor at wakes. Cardinal Logue and the several archbishops and bishops are determined to abolish the disgraceful orgies that have been so common on such occasions, and have forbidden priests to officiate at funerals or even to say masses for the souls of the dead where liquor is offered to the neighbors and mourners who sit up with the corpse. Some of the bishops require the remains to be brought to the church on the day before the funeral. As a consequence, the scandalous custom of holding a carousal the night before the funeral is almost entirely obsolete except in the slums of the large cities and in remote rural districts. As a rule throughout Ireland, where friends now gather to “sit up” with the corpse as a token of respect and sorrow, they are furnished with no stronger refreshments than tea. The teapot is placed upon the stove or upon the peat fire and the mourners help themselves as they desire; but if a bottle of liquor is passed around it is done with the greatest caution for fear the priest will hear of it.

Like the colored people of the United States, the peasants of Ireland are possessed with an ambition to have “a fine funeral.” Among the poor this form of extravagance has been the cause of a great deal of distress and privation, and formerly poor families often deprived themselves of food to supply liquor that was consumed at the wake. This hospitable custom, however, is rapidly passing away.

The Irish Association for the Prevention of Intemperance is composed of delegates from nearly all of the many temperance societies in Ireland, both Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Nonconformist, and Independent. There are many mutual benefit societies among workingmen which affiliate, and various associations of women and children. For the purpose of co-operation and economy and to avoid friction and duplication of labor, this central organization has been formed, and consists of one representative from every contributing society. The general council meets three times a year, has a complete organization, sends lecturers into the field, issues literature, makes investigations, and has committees to look after legislation that concerns the liquor traffic.

The special work of the council is to secure temperance legislation and 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:

The consumption of liquors in Ireland last year was as follows:

“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.