Bessbrook and its Linen Mills. James Ewing Ritchie
and dissipated are his habits. No fact has been more conclusively established. Where you shut up the public-house, the gin-palace and the beer-shop, you have less pauperism and crime, more honest, decent, sober living, than you have where these places are open. If this be true in England, where the people are more phlegmatic and less wild on politics and religion, it is trebly true of Ireland, where the people are supposed to be at all times too passionate and ready to take offence; where ages of political and religious partisanship have given to those passions an unnatural ferocity; and where the drop o’ drink seems to be especially potent in its working. I have travelled in most parts of England, Scotland, and Europe, but I never felt in the slightest peril from the character of my travelling companions. I have been very little in Ireland, but the most disagreeable journeys I ever made were on Irish railways. In each case the disagreeableness arose entirely from the extent to which my fellow-passengers had indulged in the national drink. Perhaps we get it adulterated in England. If so, we have reason to be thankful. Its effects on the Irish are, for the time, truly demoniacal. I have never seen people so maddened with drink as those of the sister isle. The temperate character of Bessbrook strikes you at once. There the difficult problem of carrying out a factory with the minimum of inevitable evil seems to have been satisfactorily solved.
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