Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (2 of 2) / (2nd ed.) (1888)

by William Henry Hurlbert

CHAPTER XVI.

BELFAST, Monday, June 25.—I left Dublin yesterday at 4 P.M., in a train which went off at high pressure as an “express,” but came into Belfast panting and dilatory as an “excursion.” The day was fine, and the line passes through what is reputed to be the most prosperous part of Ireland. In this part of Ireland, too, the fate of the island has been more than once settled by the arbitrament of arms; and if Parliamentary England throws up the sponge in the wrestle with the League, it is probable enough that the old story will come to be told over again here.

At Dundalk the Irish monarchy of the Braces was made and unmade. The plantation of Ulster under James I. clinched the grasp not so much of England as of Scotland upon Ireland, and determined the course of events here through the Great Rebellion. The landing of the Duke of Schomberg at Carrickfergus opened the way for the subjugation of Jacobite Ireland by William of Orange. The successful descent of the French upon the same place in February 1760, after the close of “the Great Year,” in which Walpole tells us he came to expect a new victory every morning with the rolls for breakfast, and after Hawke had broken the strength of the great French Armada off Belleisle, and done for England the service which Nelson did for her again off Trafalgar in 1805, shows what might have happened had Thurot commanded the fleet of Conflans. In this same region, too, the rout of Munro by Nugent at Ballinahinch practically ended the insurrection of 1798.

There are good reasons in the physical geography of the British Islands for this controlling influence of Ulster over the affairs of Ireland, which it seems to me a serious mistake to overlook.

The author of a brief but very hard-headed and practical letter on the pacification of Ireland, which appeared in the Times newspaper in 1886, while the air was thrilling with rumours of Mr. Gladstone’s impending appearance as the champion of “Home Rule,” carried, I remember, to the account of St. George’s Channel “nine-tenths of the troubles, religious, political, and social, under which Ireland has laboured for seven centuries.” I cannot help thinking he hit the nail on the head; and St. George’s Channel does not divide Ulster from Scotland. From Donaghadee, which has an excellent harbour, the houses on the Scottish coast can easily be made out in clear weather. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and it is as hard to see how, even with the consent of Ulster, the independence of Ireland could be maintained against the interests and the will of Scotland, as it is easy to see why Leinster, Munster, and Connaught have been so difficult of control and assimilation by England. To dream of establishing the independence of Ireland against the will of Ulster appears to me to be little short of madness.

At Moira, which stands very prettily above the Ulster Canal, a small army of people returning from a day in the country to Belfast came upon us and trebled the length of our train. We picked up more at Lisburn, where stands the Cathedral Church of Jeremy Taylor, the “Shakespeare of divines.” Here my only companion in the compartment from Dublin left me, a most kindly, intelligent Ulster man, who had very positive views as to the political situation. He much commended the recent dis course in Scotland of a Presbyterian minister, who spoke of the Papal Decree as “pouring water on a drowned mouse,” a remark which led me to elicit the fact that he had never seen either Clare or Kerry; and he was very warm in his admiration of Mr. Chamberlain. He told me, what I had heard from many other men of Ulster, that the North had armed itself thoroughly when the Home Rule business began with Mr. Gladstone. “I am a Unionist,” he said, “but I think the Union is worth as much to England as it is to Ireland, and if England means to break it up it is not the part of Irishmen who think and feel as I do to let her choose her own time for doing it, and stand still while she robs us of our property and turns us out defenceless to be trampled under foot by the most worthless vagabonds in our own island.” He thinks the National League has had its death-blow. “What I fear now,” he said, “is that we are running straight into a social war, and that will never be a war against the landlords in Ireland; it’ll be a war against the Protestants and all the decent people there are among the Catholics.”

He was very cordial when he found I was an American, and with that offhand hospitality which seems to know no distinctions of race or religion in Ireland urged me to come and make him a visit at a place he has nearer the sea-coast. “I’ll show you Downpatrick,” he said, “where the tombs of St. Patrick and St. Bridget and St. Columb are, the saints sleeping quite at their ease, with a fine prosperous Presbyterian town all about them. And I’ll drive you to Tullymore, where you’ll see the most beautiful park, and the finest views from it all the way to the Isle of Man, that are to be seen in all Ireland.” He was very much interested in the curious story of the sequestration of the remains of Mr. Stewart of New York, who was born, he tells me, at Lisburn, where the wildest fabrications on the subject seem to have got currency. That this feat of body-snatching is supposed to have been performed by a little syndicate of Italians, afterwards broken up by the firmness of Lady Crawford in resisting the ghastly pressure to which the widow and the executors of Mr. Stewart are believed to have succumbed, was quite a new idea to him.

From Moira to Belfast the scenery along the line grows in beauty steadily. If Belfast were not the busiest and most thriving city in Ireland, it would still be well worth a visit for the picturesque charms of its situation and of the scenery which surrounds it. At some future day I hope to get a better notion both of its activity and of its attractions than it would be possible for me to attempt to get in this flying visit, made solely to take the touch of the atmosphere of the place at this season of the year; for we are on the very eve of the battle month of the Boyne.

Mr. Cameron, the Town Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary, met me at the station, in accordance with a promise which he kindly made when I saw him several weeks ago at Cork; and this morning he took me all over the city. It is very well laid out, in the new quarters especially, with broad avenues and spacious squares. In fact, as a local wag said to me to-day at the Ulster Club, “You can drive through Belfast without once going into a street”—most of the thoroughfares which are not called “avenues” or “places” being known as “roads.” It is, of course, an essentially modern city. When Boate made his survey of Ireland two centuries ago, Belfast was so small a place that he took small note of it, though it had been incorporated by James I. in 1613 in favour of the Chichester family, still represented here. In a very careful Tour in Ireland, published at Dublin in 1780, the author says of Belfast, “I could not help remarking the great number of Scots who reside in this place, and who carry on a good trade with Scotland.” It seems then to have had a population of less than 20,000 souls, as it only touched that number at the beginning of this century. It has since then advanced by “leaps and bounds,” after an almost American fashion, till it has now become the second, and bids fair at no distant day to become the first, city in Ireland. Few of the American cities which are its true contemporaries can be compared with Belfast in beauty. The quarter in which my host lives was reclaimed from the sea marshes not quite so long ago, I believe, as was the Commonwealth Avenue quarter of Boston, and though it does not show so many costly private houses perhaps as that quarter of the New England capital, its “roads” and “avenues” are on the whole better built, and there is no public building in Boston so imposing as the Queen’s College, with its Tudor front six hundred feet in length, and its graceful central tower. The Botanic Gardens near by are much prettier and much better equipped for the pleasure and instruction of the people than any public gardens in either Boston or New York. These American comparisons make themselves, all the conditions of Belfast being rather of the New World than of the Old. The oldest building pointed out to me to-day is the whilom mansion of the Marquis of Donegal, now used as offices, and still called the Castle.

This stands near Donegal Square, a fine site, disfigured by a quadrangle of commonplace brick buildings, occupied as a sort of Linen Exchange, concerning which a controversy rages, I am told. They are erected on land granted by Lord Donegal to encourage the linen trade, and the buildings used to be leased at a rental of £1 per window. The present holders receive £10 per window, and are naturally loath to part with so good a thing, though there is an earnest desire in the city to see these unsightly structures removed, and their place taken by stately municipal buildings more in key with the really remarkable and monumental private warehouses which already adorn this Square. Mr. Robinson, one of the partners of a firm which has just completed one of these warehouses, was good enough to show us over it. It is built of a warm grey stone, which lends itself easily to the chisel, and it is decorated with a wealth of carving and of architectural ornaments such as the great burghers of Flanders lavished on their public buildings. The interior arrangements are worthy of the external stateliness of the warehouse. Pneumatic tubes for the delivery of cash—a Scottish invention—electric lights, steam lifts, a kitchen at the top of the lofty edifice heated by steam from the great engine-room in the cellars, and furnishing meals to the employees, attest the energy and enterprise of the firm. The most delicate of the linen fabrics sold here are made, I was informed, all over the north country. The looms, three or four of which are kept going here in a great room to show the intricacy and perfection of the processes, are supplied by the firm to the hand-workers on a system which enables them, while earning good wages from week to week, to acquire the eventual ownership of the machines. The building is crowned by a sort of observatory, from which we enjoyed a noble prospect overlooking the whole city and miles of the beautiful country around. A haze on the horizon hid the coast of Scotland, which is quite visible under a clear sky. The Queen’s Bridge over the Lagan, built in 1842 between Antrim and Down, was a conspicuous feature in the panorama. Its five great arches of hewn granite span the distance formerly traversed by an older bridge of twenty-one arches 840 feet in length, which was begun in 1682, and finished just in time to welcome Schomberg and King William.