During the day I walked through many of the worst quarters of Dublin. I met fewer beggars in proportion than one encounters in such parts of London as South Kensington and other residential regions not over-frequented by the perambulating policemen; but I was struck by the number of persons—and particularly of women—who wore that most pathetic of all the liveries of distress, “the look of having seen better days.” In the most wretched streets I traversed there was more squalor than suffering—the dirtiest and most ragged people in them showing no signs of starvation, or even of insufficient rations; and certainly in the most dismal alleys and by-streets, I came upon nothing so revolting as the hives of crowded misery which make certain of the tenement house quarters of New York more gruesome than the Cour des Miracles itself used to be.
This morning at 7.25 A.M. I left Dublin with Lord Ernest Hamilton for Strabane. My attention was distracted from the reports of the great meeting by the varied and picturesque beauty of the landscape, through which we ran at a very respectable rate in a very comfortable carriage. We passed Dundalk, where Edward Bruce got himself crowned king of Ireland, after his brother Robert had won a throne in Scotland.
These masterful Normans, all over Europe from Apulia to Britain, worked out the problem of “satisfied nationalities” much more successfully and simply than Napoleon III. in our own day. If Edward Bruce broke down where Robert succeeded, the causes of his failure may perhaps be worth considering even now by people who have set themselves the task in our times of establishing “an Irish nationality.” Leaving out the Cromwellian English of Tipperary and the South, and the Scotch who have done for Ulster, what he aimed at for all Ireland, they have very much the same materials to deal with as those which he dismally failed to fashion.
Drogheda stands beautifully in a deep valley through which flows the Boyne Water, spanned by one of the finest viaducts in Europe. Here, two years after the discovery of America, Poyning’s Parliament enacted that all laws passed in Ireland must be subject to approval by the English Privy Council. I wonder nobody has proposed a modification of this form of Home Rule for Ireland now. Earl Grey’s recent suggestion that Parliamentary government be suspended for ten years in Ireland, which I heard warmly applauded by some able lawyers and business men in Dublin, involves like this an elimination of the Westminster debates from the problem of government in Ireland. As we passed Drogheda, Father Burke’s magnificent presence and thrilling voice came back to me out of the mist of years, describing with an indignant pathos, never to be forgotten, the fearful scenes which followed the surrender of Sir Arthur Ashton’s garrison, when “for the glory of God,” and “to prevent the further effusion of blood,” Oliver ordered all the officers to be knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped as slaves to the Barbadoes. But how different was the spirit in which the great Dominican recalled these events from that in which the “popular orators,” scattering firebrands and death, delight to dwell upon them!
At Strabane station we found a handsome outside car waiting on us, and drove off briskly for this charming place, the home of one of the most active and prosperous manufacturers in Ireland. A little more than half way between the station and Sion House, Mr. Herdman met us afoot. We jumped off and walked up with him. Sion House, built for him by his brother, an accomplished architect, is a handsome Queen Anne mansion. It stands on a fine knoll, commanding lovely views on all sides. Below it, and beyond a little stream, rise the extensive flax-mills which are the life of the place, under the eye and within touch of the hand of the master. These works were established here by Mr. Herdman’s father, after he had made a vain attempt to establish them at Ballyshannon in Donegal, half a century ago. As all salmon fishers know, the water-power is admirable at Ballyshannon, where the Erne pours in torrents down a thirty feet fall. But the ignorance and indolence of the people made Ballyshannon quite impossible, with this result, that while the Erne still flows unvexed to the sea, and the people of Ballyshannon live very much as they lived in 1835, here at Sion the Mourne enables 1100 Irish operatives to work up £90,000 worth of Irish flax every year into yarn for the Continent, and to divide among themselves some £20,000 a year in wages.
After luncheon we walked with Mr. Herdman through the mills and the model village which has grown up around them. Everywhere we found order, neatness, and thrift. The operatives are almost all people of the country, Catholics and Protestants in almost equal numbers. “I find it wise,” said Mr. Herdman, “to give neither religion a preponderance, and to hold my people of both religions to a common standard of fidelity and efficiency.” The greatest difficulty he has had to contend with is the ineradicable objection of some of the peasantry to continuous industry. He told us of a strapping lass of eighteen who came to the mills, but very soon gave up and went back to the parental shebeen in the mountains rather than get up early in the morning to earn fourteen shillings a week.
Three weeks of her work would have paid the year’s rent of the paternal holding.
In the village, which is regularly laid out, is a reading-room for the workpeople. There are cricket clubs, and one of the mill buildings (just now crammed with bales of flax) has been fitted up by Mr. Herdman as a theatre. There is a drop-curtain representing the Lake of Como, and the flies are flanked by life-size copies in plaster of the Apollo Belvidere and the Medicean Venus. This is a development I had hardly looked to see in Ulster.
After we had gone over the works thoroughly, Mr. Herdman took us back, on a transparent pretext of enlightened curiosity touching certain qualities of spun flax, to give us a glimpse of the “beauty of Sion”—a well-grown graceful girl of fifteen or sixteen summers. She concentrated her attention, as soon as we appeared, upon certain mysterious bobbins and spindles, with an exaggerated determination which proved how completely she saw through our futile and frivolous devices. Mr. Herdman told us, as we came away discomfited, a droll story of the ugliest girl ever employed here—a girl so preternaturally ugly that one of his best blacksmiths having been entrapped into offering to marry her, lost heart of grace on the eve of the sacrifice, and, taking ship at Derry for America, fled from Sion for ever.
In the evening came, with other guests, Dr. Webb, Q.C., Regius Professor of Laws and Public Orator of Trinity at Dublin, well known both as a Grecian capable of composing “skits” as clever as the verses yclept Homerstotle—in which the Saturday Review served up the Donnelly nonsense about Bacon and Shakespeare—and as a translator of Faust. He was abused by the Loyalists at Dublin, in 1884, for his defence of P.N. Fitzgerald, the leader who beat Parnell and Archbishop Croke so badly at Thurles the other day; and he is in a fair way now to be denounced with equal fervour by the Nationalists as a County Court judge in Donegal. He finds this post no sinecure. “I do as much work in five days,” he said to-night, “as the Superior Judges do in five weeks.”