XLVI.
THE EAST AND THE WEST—LANDLORDS AND LANDLORDS.
For good and sufficient reasons the railway carriage whisked through the rich country, carrying me from Castle Bellingham to Rath Cottage by the Moat of Dunfane. There is one beautiful difference between the North and the West; the North is full of people, the hill sides are dotted thickly with white dwellings—so much for the Ulster Custom. It pleases the people to tell them that the superior prosperity of their northern fields is due to their religious faith. Some parts of Lord Mount Cashel's estate, when sold in the Encumbered Estates Court, did not pass into hands governed by the same opinions as to the rights and duties which property confers as are held by Mr. Young, of Galgorm Castle. Their tenants complain of rack rents as bitterly as if they lived in the west. They are looking eagerly to the new law for redress. In fact when they find their tenant-right eaten up by a vast increase of rent they consider their faith powerless in the face of their landlord's works.
I do not think any one can pass through this country without noticing a vast difference which is not a religious difference, between one property as to management and another, between one part of the country and another. In some parts the tenants build the houses, whatever sort of houses they are able to build; they repair them as they are able, and the landlords get the rent of them. If by any means they can improve them, the landlord improves the rent to a higher figure.
I was over one property in the County Antrim, the property of a man who combines landholding as a middleman, with trade in linen fabrics and manufacturing or bleaching, or both. I cannot say that this gentleman is excessively popular, but he is exceedingly prosperous. His private residence, as far as taste goes, a taste that can be gratified regardless of expense, is as perfectly beautiful within its limits as the property of any lord of the soil which I have come across. Indeed, the arrangements made at such cost, kept up to such perfection, spoke of one who owed his income to trade and not to his land alone. His hot- houses, heavy with grapes, rich with peaches and nectarines, and fragrant with rare flowers, were verily on a lordly scale. It was his tenement houses that attracted my attention chiefly. They were well- roofed, slated in almost every instance; not a roof was broken that he owned. The cottages were rough cast and washed over with drab; they were covered with roses that were in as rich bloom as if they were blooming for gentry. Truly the tenants planted them, but a tenant who plants roses is not living in a state of desperation as to the means of existence. When he sent men to wash over the tenement houses, and the good wives trembled for the roses. "The gardener shall come and arrange them again and see that they are not harmed in the least," he said.
They tell me that this gentleman, being a trader with a commercial mind, takes for his tenements the utmost they will bring. If so, when he builds the houses, and keeps them in thorough repair, it is surely doing what he will with his own. Others who do not build, who never repair, surely raise the rent on what is, strictly and honestly speaking, not their own.
There is a difference between this gentleman, whose tenants say, "He will send his own gardener to fix up the roses again after the white, or rather gray washing," and the lord in the West whose tenants say, "If he saw a patch of flowers at the door, he would compel us to grub it up as something beyond our station."
The agent on the Galgorm estate told me that during twenty-five years, when he was in Lord Mount Cashel's land office, there was but one eviction, and that man got four hundred pounds for his tenant right before he left the yard. This is one man's testimony of one landlord.
Ulster, as a whole, has had more evictions, pending the Land Bill, than any other of the provinces. It is true that she has more people to evict. Her rent-roll during the last-eighty years has risen from L124,481 to L1,440,072. One million, three hundred and fifteen thousand five hundred and ninety one pounds of a rise.