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

by William Henry Hurlbert

In former years Sir John Preston used to visit Gweedore every year for sport and recreation. He knew Lord George Hill very well, “as true and noble a man as ever lived, who stinted himself to improve the state of his tenants.” He threw an odd light on the dreamy desire which had so much amused me of the “beauty of Gweedore” to become “a dressmaker at Derry,” by telling me that long ago the gossips there used to tell wonderful stories of a Gweedore girl who had made her fortune as a milliner in the “Maiden City.”

This morning Mr. Cameron, who as Town Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary will be responsible for public peace and order here during the next critical fortnight, held a review of his men on a common beyond the Theological College. About two hundred and fifty of the force were paraded, with about twenty mounted policemen, and for an hour and a half, under a tolerably warm sun, they were put through a regular military drill. A finer body of men cannot be seen, and in point of discipline and training they can hold their own, I should say, with the best of her Majesty’s regiments. Without such discipline and training it would not be easy for any such body of men to pass with composure through the ordeal of insults and abuse to which the testimony of trustworthy eye-witnesses compels me to believe they are habitually subjected in the more disturbed districts of Ireland. As to the immediate outlook here, Mr. Cameron seems quite at his ease. Even if ill-disposed persons should set about provoking a collision between “the victors and the vanquished of the Boyne” his arrangements are so made, he says, as to prevent the development of anything like the outbreaks of former years.

On the advice of Sir John Preston I shall take the Fleetwood route on my return to London to-night.

This secures one a comfortable night on board of a very good and well-equipped boat, from which you go ashore, he tells me, into an excellent station of the London and North-Western Railway at Fleetwood, on the mouth of the Wyre on the Lancashire coast. Twenty years ago this was a small bathing resort called into existence chiefly by the enterprise of a local baronet whose name it bears. Its present prosperity and prospective importance are another illustration of the vigour and vitality of the North of Ireland, which is connected through Fleetwood with the great manufacturing regions of middle and northern England, as it is through Larne with the heart of Scotland.

While it is as true now of the predominantly Catholic south of Ireland as it was when Sir Robert Peel made the remark forty years ago, that it stands “with its back to England and its face to the West,” this Protestant Ireland of the North faces both ways, drawing Canada and the United States to itself through Moville and Derry and Belfast, and holding fast at the same time upon the resources of Great Britain through Glasgow and Liverpool. One of the best informed bankers in London told me not long ago, that pretty nearly all the securities of the great company which has recently taken over the business of the Guinnesses have already found their way into the North of Ireland and are held here. With such resources in its wealth and industry, better educated, better equipped, and holding a practically impregnable position in the North of Ireland, with Scotland and the sea at its back, Ulster is very much stronger relatively to the rest of Ireland than La Vendée was relatively to the rest of the French Republic in the last century. In a struggle for independence against the rest of Ireland it would have nothing to fear from the United States, where any attempt to organise hostilities against it would put the Irish-American population in serious peril, not only from the American Government, but from popular feeling, and force home upon the attention of the quickest-witted people in the world the significant fact that while the chief contributions, so far, of America to Southern Ireland, have been alms and agitation, the chief contributions of Scotland to Northern Ireland have been skilled agriculture and successful activity. It is surely not without meaning that the only steamers of Irish build which now traverse the Atlantic come from the dockyards, not of Galway nor of Cork, the natural gateways of Ireland to the west, but of Belfast, the natural gateway of Ireland to the north .

EPILOGUE.

Not once, but a hundred times, during the visits to Ireland recorded in this book, I have been reminded of the state of feeling and opinion which existed in the Border States, as they were called, of the American Union, after the invasion of Virginia by a piratical band under John Brown, and before the long-pending issues between the South, insisting upon its constitutional rights, and the North, restive under its constitutional obligations, were brought to a head by the election of President Lincoln.

All analogies, I know, are deceptive, and I do not insist upon this analogy. But it has a certain value here. For to-day in Ireland, as then in America, we find a grave question of politics, in itself not unmanageable, perhaps, by a race trained to self-government, seriously complicated and aggravated, not only by considerations of moral right and moral wrong, but by a profound perturbation of the material interests of the community.

I well remember that after a careful study of the situation in America at the time of which I speak, Mr. Nassau Senior, a most careful and competent observer, frankly told me that he saw no possible way in which the problem could be worked out peacefully. The event justified this gloomy forecast.

It would be presumptuous in me to say as much of the actual situation in Ireland; but it would be uncandid not to say that the optimists of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee had greater apparent odds in their favour in 1861 than the optimists of Ireland seem to me to have in 1888.