Belfast.
The capital of Ulster is naturally the most flourishing town of Ireland. Whereas the others decrease in population and wealth, Belfast is rapidly thriving. From 20,000 inhabitants, which it numbered at the beginning of the century, it has risen in eighty years to 210,000. Another ten years and it will outdo Dublin itself. It is a manufacturing city as well as a big trading port. By an exception, unique in the island, it occupies a great number of workers, male and female—60,000, at the lowest computation—for the most part, in the weaving trade and naval construction. A single linen factory, that of Messrs. Mulholland, gives work to 29,000 pairs of hands. It is those weaving looms which utilize the product of the 110,000 acres of flax fields in Ulster. Out of nineteen ships of over 300 tons annually built in the docks of the island eighteen come out of the Belfast wharves. It is, in short, the maritime gate of Irish import and export—the insular suburb of Liverpool and Glasgow.
As a consequence, signs of prosperity are showing themselves everywhere. The public walks are vast and carefully kept, the houses well built, the shops substantial and elegant, the educational establishments important and richly endowed. The town has a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon aspect. London fashions are scrupulously followed there. If you enter the Botanical Garden, maintained by voluntary contributions, you find there the lawn-tennis, the dresses, the ways of the metropolis. If you follow the road up to Cave Hill, one of the heights on the western side of Belfast, you embrace a vast landscape, where the flying steamers on the Lagan, the smoking factory-chimneys, the innumerable and opulent villas round its shores, all speak of wealth and prosperity.
The population is about equally divided between Protestants and Catholics. The consequence is that party hatred and the struggle for local influence are far more ardent and long-lived here than in places where one of the two elements has an overwhelming majority. Electoral scuffles easily turn to bloody battles; political anniversaries—that of the Battle of the Boyne, above all—are a pretext for manifestations which often degenerate into regular battles.
Belfast is the bulwark of Orangeism; and Orangeism may be described as Protestant and loyalist fanaticism, as opposed to Catholic and national fanaticism. Shankhill Road, which is frequently used as a battle-field by the antagonistic parties, is a long suburb which divides as a frontier line the Orangeist from the Irish quarters.
Hardly one pay-day passes without the public-houses of that suburb being the theatre of some pugilistic feat accomplished by some voluntary representatives of the opposite camps. If the police happen to rush into the fray, reinforcements are called from either side; stones, cudgels, revolvers come to the rescue, and, on the morrow, the jails are filled with prisoners, and the hospitals with the dead and the wounded.
Sad to relate, it is the clergy on both sides who incite them to those fratricidal struggles. There are certain Protestant preachers who are in no way behindhand in bitterness and virulent abuse with the most fanatic priest of Roscommon or Mayo. I have heard personally in Falls Road a Methodist preaching in the open air incite his audience to the extermination of Papists in strains which the creatures of Cromwell would not have disowned.
In order that nothing should be missing to the parallel, Ulster has its Orangeist League, not unlike the National League of Ireland (save for the respect of legality and the general moderation of proceedings). That League is formed into battalions and companies which are privately drilled, they say, and lose no occasion to make a pageant in the streets with accompaniment of trumpets and drums, and whose ways remind one of the Salvation Army.