han 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.

At Castleisland, the scene of so many outrages, the population of the
town is thirteen hundred, and the number of whisky shops is fifty-two.
Very nearly the same proportion can be noticed in several other towns.

There never was an outrage committed without an empty whisky bottle
being found close to the scene of the murder.

In the worst time a moonlighter slept for a fortnight close to the house
of an Irish landlord, who was well aware that he was there for the
express purpose of shooting him, but he never even