The North of Ireland
Londonderry, Ireland, September 8.
Crossing the Irish Sea from Fishguard in southern Wales to Rosslare in southern Ireland, I met a jolly Irishman from Cork. When I told him I was going to the North of Ireland he remonstrated. “Don’t do it, mon. Every Irishman up there is a Scotchman!” But I had seen the beautiful South of Ireland and we had to come to Londonderry to take the ship for home, so the warning of the Corker was in vain. I found that he was right. Soon after we left Dublin we came upon linen factories and distilleries and Presbyterian churches, people too busy to jolly a stranger, and cannily seeking the surest way to a sixpence. In the South of Ireland no one is too busy to talk with the stranger and to tell him all the legendary lore of the country, while in the North one shrinks from stopping the busy worker, even to ask him which way is straight up. The people of both ends of Ireland are pleasant and the American dollar isgreatly admired, but the process of extracting it is painless, even pleasant, in Cork, while it hurts enough to notice in Belfast. The South is almost entirely agricultural and is social, while the North is filled with factories and notices not to allow your heads to stick out of the windows. The people of the South are poorer but happier; the people of the North are busier and more worried in their looks. The Irishman in the South smiles pleasantly without an apparent thought of the money he is going to make, the Irishman in the North smiles after he gets the money.
All of this Emerald isle is green, and picturesque scenery with lakes and falls, glens and fields, rugged coasts and beautiful beaches is to be found from Queenstown to Portrush.
We stopped a day in Dublin, which is an Irish city with a large tinge of English. It was the capital of Ireland prior to the consolidation of the Irish Parliament with that of Great Britain, and may still be called so because the Lord-Lieutenant Governor lives here and has a sort of a court. There are about400,000 people, packed in too tightly and with not enough work to keep many of them in decent living and style. That is the trouble in Ireland—one of their troubles, the lack of opportunity for work. There is not much for the energetic young Irishman to do but to emigrate, and he goes to America or Canada or Australia, or even to England, to get a job and a chance. The land is nearly all owned by men who do not live in Ireland, and is rented to farmers who find that when they improve their places it means a raise in rent. The new land law which gives a man a sort of title to his leased land, and makes a court of arbitration as to rent and purchase, is improving conditions in Ireland and they are better off now in respect to land than they are in England, except for the blight of absentee landlordism, the system which takes the rent-money and spends it in London or in Paris.
Dublin is perking up some on the prospect of home rule, which would bring an Irish legislature to Dublin and make the city a real capital. But the prospect for home rule is dubious. The Irish party holds the balanceof power in the English Parliament and has been allied with the Liberals in their reforms and the dehorning of the House of Lords. The Liberals have promised the Irish home rule, and the leaders will try to fulfill the promise, but they may find it hard work to line up their followers, and let it go until another general election. There are so many other questions involved in English politics that home rule may be lost in the shuffle, but as the Irish are the best politicians in the world they are looking forward to success after a lovely fight.
The city of Belfast, a hundred miles north of Dublin, is the center of the linen trade. The English Parliament a couple of hundred years ago prohibited the manufacture of wool in Ireland because it competed with English trade, but promoted the spinning of linen. The climate is just right, labor is cheap, and Irish linen is the best in the world. We visited a linen mill, and also a cottage where the hand looms were at work. The wages paid to good hands are 50 to 75 cents a day. This would be fair wages in Europe, but the work is notalways steady and many days are lost in setting the patterns and fixing the looms. The manager of the factory said that most of his best men went to America—he himself had two sons in New York. The wages here will keep soul and body together if the body is willing to get along on fish and potatoes. But there is no outcome, no prospect of a future which shall include a beefsteak once a week. The manager had been in America and he knew the difference. “Our workmen are all right because they don’t know the luxuries the American workman has, except by hearsay. Of course if they once get the appetite for meat and a new suit of clothes every year they have to leave us. But a two-eyed beefsteak makes a good meal.” A two-eyed beefsteak is an Irish name for a herring.
Belfast has great ship-building yards, next to Glasgow the greatest in the world. It also has large distilleries which supply England and America. I am told that the consumption of liquor is on the decrease in Ireland. I hope so. But the distilleries keep building additions and enlarging their plants.
Which recalls the old story of the Illinois statesman who was a great drinker and was ruining the prospect of a useful life. His family and friends tried to stop him, but the habit or disease could not be overcome. One night a friend had him out for a walk, trying to sober him up for important business the next day. They passed a distillery and the friend said: “John, what a fool you are to try to drink all the whisky that is made. You can’t do it. See that busy distillery with its bright lights and throbbing engines. You can’t beat it.” John looked, and then with drunken dignity replied: “Perhaps you’re right. But don you shee I’m making ’em work nights?”
The drink problem is the hardest to solve in Great Britain, England, Ireland and Scotland. It is worse than the wage problem or the land problem. In no other countries that I have visited are the evils of booze so plainly in evidence as in the British Isles. In Germany the sight of the family in the beer garden with their mugs of creamy liquid, theirgood-nature and their temperance, does not make an unpleasant impression. In France and the southern countries, where wine is the common beverage, one does not worry about this custom. But in England, Ireland and Scotland, where you see men and women drunk in the streets and in the gutters, where you see children ragged and barefooted, homes cheerless and pauperism prevalent, all plainly because of the drink, the sensibility of even the most seasoned is shocked. Public-houses with women behind the bars, open seven days in the week and handing out the whisky which temporarily exhilarates and then stupefies and degrades, are one of the companion pictures to the great buildings, wonderful achievements and artistic developments which one sees in every British town. The temperance societies work hard, the government would help if it dared, but the drinking, the suffering and the pauperizing process goes on. The distilleries are enlarging, and working nights.
I talked this matter over with an intelligent Irishman, and he agreed with me that ifthe drinking of liquor could be abolished it would do away with nine-tenths of the poverty. “But see these poor fellows and how they work,” he said. “Saturday night comes, and who can blame them for having a few pleasant hours even if it is all imagination, and even if they do go to work on blue Monday with aching heads and a little tremble.”
Which is very poor argument, for it does not take in the dependent wives and children. And the Saturday night drunk makes a poor workman on Monday.
On the northern coast of Ireland, near Portrush and a number of beautiful summer resorts, is the Giant’s Causeway. The origin of this really wonderful freak of nature is said by archæologists to be volcanic, and that the Causeway, the adjoining cliffs and several islands are products that came from a volcano in the shape of burning lava, and were then thrown into shape by later explosions as the molten mass was cooling. The Causeway is a formation like a pier extending into the ocean and made up of 40,000 pillars (by Irish count), each a separate column andusually five-or six-sided. They are about twenty feet long, twenty inches in diameter and jointed like mason-work, or more like a bamboo rod. The theory is that as the lava cooled it cracked and shrunk. Perhaps so. Nobody saw it.
I prefer the Irish version, which is simpler and easy to understand.
Fin MacCoul, the giant, was the champion of Ireland. He had knocked out all rivals and no one could stand in front of him for a second round. He was as great a man in Ireland as John L. Sullivan used to be in Boston. Over in Scotland a certain Caledonia giant boasted that he could lick any man on earth, Irish preferred. He gave out an interview to the newspapers, saying that if it were not for the wetting he would cross over and take the Irish championship from Fin. After much of the usual mouth-work between the champions, Fin got permission from the king, constructed the Causeway from Ireland to Scotland, and dared the Caledonian to come across. The Scot was game, and the match was pulled off without policeinterference, resulting in a victory for Fin, who kindly allowed his beaten rival to settle in Ireland and open a saloon. Ireland was then, as it is now, the finest country in the world, so the Scotchman lived happily ever afterward. The Causeway gradually sank into the sea, and all that is now in sight is the Irish end and a few islands between it and the Scottish coast.
The formation of the coast for several miles each side of the Causeway is the same volcanic rock, and it rises abruptly hundreds of feet high from the sea. Caves and caverns with arches and vaults and echoes, and natural amphitheatres with the pipe organ Fin used to play and the bathtub which he used, are visited by the visitors who go out upon the Atlantic in a row-boat. I have seen Niagara and the Falls of the Rhine, and the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, and a few hundred more wonderful works of Nature or of giants, and the Causeway is not second to any of them.
Our last stop in Ireland is this town of Londonderry, known in Ireland as“Derry.” The London end of the name was put on by King James the First, who was so devoted to his religion that he killed or exiled the Catholic Irish in Ulster and Derry and gave their lands to Protestant emigrants from England. A few years later Cromwell finished the job and got the name of “Thorough,” because of his theory that the only good Irishman was a dead Irishman. There were terrible religious wars in Ireland for years, each side getting even for outrages committed by the other. One great event in the series was the siege of Londonderry by an Irish army under James the Second, who had been run out of England by William of Orange. James was about to enter the city with the consent of the governor, when thirteen apprentice boys banged down the portcullis, closing the entrance. That started the fight, and the people of Londonderry decided to stand the siege. They repulsed the soldiers and James tried to starve ’em out. The siege, which began with no preparation for defense, lasted seven months, and half the population died of starvation. The people ate dogs and cats and rats, a rat selling for three shillings.At last an English fleet broke through the obstruction in the river, and the remnant of the people of Londonderry was saved.
Those were “good old times.” The Protestants of Londonderry knew if they surrendered they would meet the same fate that they had accorded to the Catholics on the capture of Irish towns, and there is hardly a town in Ireland which cannot duplicate the story of the siege of Londonderry. Those days are gone, Irish and English have laid aside their weapons, and except for St. Patrick’s Day or the 12th of July, which is the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne in which William defeated James, there is hardly a broken head in the country from religious causes.
The walls still stand in Londonderry, and some of the cannon of 1689 are mounted at the old stand. But the walls are now a promenade and the cannon are only relics. A Protestant cathedral and a Catholic cathedral, a Presbyterian college and a Catholic college, are doing business side by side, and all are doing good. Two steamship lines have made Derry a regular stop on their way fromGlasgow to America. The principal business of the town is the manufacture of linen and whisky, most of which is exported to the United States. And Irishmen from the North of the isle, who want an opportunity and a chance, come to Derry on their way to the best land of all, discovered by the Spanish, developed by the English, and ruled generally by the Irish, known and loved as home now by more Irish than are in Ireland, the U. S. A.