American pork-packing interest appears to keep quite half the country going. But how have these things been accomplished? Certainly not by the breeding and rearing of single pigs in people’s houses. No, the American Irish have gone in for pig-keeping on wholesale and colossal lines. They have turned the gentleman that pays the rent out of the house into fields and pens, they have made a business of the feeding and fattening of him, and they have erected mammoth factories wherein he may be slaughtered and salted down by the thousand. Ireland might with indisputable advantage take a leaf out of the bulky lard-stained book of Chicago. Irish bacon will always command quite as good a price as the best American that was ever exported. The English market for it is practically inexhaustible, but apparently nobody but the Americans has enterprise or courage enough to exploit that market. In America the pigs for the packing trade are understood to be fed on apples and pea-flour, and I have seen it suggested that because they are amply supplied with these staples, the American pig-feeders will always have the advantage of possible competitors. There are neither apples nor pea-flour in Ireland; but there is the potato, and if ever an article of food was designed for a special sort of beast, the potato was designed for the pig. The Irish should endeavor to remember that if the potato have any virtue at all, it was intended for the feeding of pigs, and not of human beings. The English farmer does not, when the dinner hour draws nigh, lead forth his wife and children to his hay-chamber for nutriment, and the Irishman should have just as small a gustatory regard for his store of potatoes. It is pig-feed, my dear Patrick, pig-feed, and not victuals at all. If the English peasantry were to take to a diet of chopped hay and husks to-morrow, the English landlords would not lift a little finger to prevent them, and within a twelvemonth they would adjust matters by putting up rents all round. So long as you, the low wild Irish, choose to be content with the same diet as your household pet, so long may you remain content, and so long will the landlords look to it that you get no other food. I do not believe for a moment that Ireland is going to be regenerated on political, measure-making Parliamentary lines. Her regeneration will have to come out of herself. So much of it as has already been accomplished has come wholly out of herself, and not out of legislation at all. The rest will follow if the Irish people have a mind to deal as straightly with themselves in the future as they have dealt with themselves in the past. And I should say that at all costs the potato-and-pig habit, as it now exists in Ireland, should be broken, and got rid of, and utterly wiped out. CHAPTER XX EMIGRATION