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 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 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 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.