On the other hand, the farmers grow thriftier and thriftier. Sir Horace Plunkett and men like him, truly patriotic Irishmen, are showing them the way. Successive Land Acts lift them more and more into a position of security from one of precariousness. They have more money now to put in the savings-banks. Their prosperity does not mean a higher standard of living, although that is badly needed. It means more money in the banks--that is all.
The Irish are very like the French. If the day should come when they should learn, like the French, to be thrifty and usurious, I hope I shall not be there to see it. Better--a thousand times better--that they should remain royal wastrels to the end.
As yet we need not fear it. Still, if you ask a drink of water at a mountain cabin in the poorest parts of Ireland, you are given milk; and _do not offer to pay for it_, lest you sink to the lowest place in the estimation of these splendid givers.
The hospitality is truly splendid. There is a saying in Ireland that they always put an extra bit in the pot for "the man coming over the hill." It is an unheard-of thing that you should call at an Irish house and not be asked if "you've a mouth on you." If your visit be within anything like measurable distance of meal-time you will be obliged to stay for the meal.
In England, when people are poor, or comparatively so, or feel the need of retrenchment, they "do not entertain." It is almost the first form of retrenchment which suggests itself to the Englishman; whereas to curtail his hospitalities would be the last form of retrenchment to an Irishman, and you will be entertained generously and lavishly by people you know to be poor. The Englishman's different way of looking at the matter is no doubt partly due to the fact that he is a much more domestic person than the Irishman, and depends mainly on his family life for his happiness and pleasure. Now, the French do not give hospitality at all outside the large family circle, so that in that regard at least the Irish will have a long way to travel before they touch with the French.
I have said that the Irish are not domestic. They are gregarious, but not domestic. The Irishman depends a deal on the neighbours; he has no such way of enclosing himself within a little fortified place of home against all the ills of the world as has the Englishman. Irish mothers, like Irish nurses, are often tenderly, exquisitely soft and warm; but the young ones will fly out of the nest for all that. Perhaps the art of making the home pleasant is not an Irish art. Perhaps it is the gregariousness, general and not particular--at least, general in the sense of embracing the parish and not the family. To the young Irish and a good many of their elders the home is dull. They go off to America, leaving the old people to loneliness, because there is no amusement. They do not make their own interests, as the slower, less vivacious nations do. The rainy Irish climate seems made for a people who would find their pleasures indoors. But the Irish will be out and about, telling good stories and hearing them. They are an artistic people, with great traditions; yet books or music or conversation will not keep them at home. If they cannot have the neighbours in, they will go out to the neighbours.
