BELFAST REVISITED.
AS our steamer wound its way up the Belfast Lough on a fine morning at the end of September, I must confess to having experienced a certain perturbation of mind. Was I going to be disillusioned by the sight of the great city and its inhabitants ? For nearly forty years I had refused to bow to the English Home Rule and Radical view of Belfast. But suppose I found that I had been cherishing a series of illusions—what then ? In a word, and to be quite honest, I felt as a convert to Romanism might feel on a first visit to Rome. Suppose the Pope and the Cardinals and the Curia did not turn out to be as wise and splendid and as divinely equipped as they seemed in Farm Street ? Any way, the situation had got to be faced, for the soundness of my whole Irish view rested on an Ulster and so a Belfast foundation. It was some thirty-two years since I had been in Ulster. At that visit I formed the opinion, which has never left me since, that it was only by a frank and honest recognition of the existence of the two Irelands that one could possibly solve the Irish problem. If the people who formed the two Irelands had been mixed in the same proportions throughout Ireland—i.e., if in every part the Protestants had always been in minority of about a fourth—the problem would have been simple enough. But that was not the situation. Those who were the minority in the South of Ireland were the majority in a well-defined area in the North of Ireland. Further, this well-defined area in the North contained the only great and enterprising city in the island—the only community which, judged from the business point of view, was efficient and progressive. Still, I argued with myself, suppose I should find that some new element has arisen since 1890 or that my original diagnosis of Ulster was defective ? What then ? Tao sun rose on the grey waters of the Lough, and vs e found our ship sliding past the great gantries, the vast wharfs and basins, and the huge straddling iron towers of the shipyards. A more thrilling sight can hardly be imagined. All seaports cast a spell, but when the port is also, as in the case of Belfast, a great shipbuilding centre, a place where the mightiest ships that have ever floated have been built and are being built, the sombre magnificence of the home of mechanical power is vastly increased.
On every side inner voices were calling to us that there was no ocean, no sea, no port, no river in the globe that was not full of the labours of Belfast. Ships that are built at Belfast leave the nests in which they were born, never perhaps to return to her waters, but they carry her name and her handiwork throUghout the world. As this thought came to 'mind, there towered up close to us the sides of the ' San Benito,' a strange-looking ship just being got ready for the sea. Though it was now almost day, all her electric lights were in full blaze, and men were swarming over her decks in what seemed a delirium of hurry and business. We were to read a day later how she had just been completed, how she was the first merchant ship to be fitted with electric trans- mission, and how she was destined for the West India trade.
Later we passed the hull of a ship only three- quarters built with the name Sophocles ' painted in huge letters on her bows. Here indeed was a thrilling mystery. Why Sophocles ' ? What had that Greek of the Greeks, austere in the extremity of his sensuous emotionalism, got to do with Belfast ? The ready explanation was either that she was a ship built for the Greek Government or else that she belonged to some patriotic Greek shipowner with literary tastes— some successor to Sir Basil Zaharoff in the ardent mixture of imagination, business, and high patriotism. Curiously enough, our explanation proved like that described in one of the notes with which Gibbon floors the orthodox allegations of an early Christian Father. " This explanation is probable, but certainly false." The Sophocles ' was to sail out of the Port of Aberdeen, not the Piraeus or Corinth, and belonged to a Scottish line, all of whose ships are adorned with glorious Greek names—Pericles, Empedocles, and so forth—a moving testimony to Scottish scholarship and learning. Here was proof of how loyally Aberdeen maintains the Greek spirit.
How we wished we could recall the benign and beloved poet of Hellas and see him learning with wonder that the children of the Muses are honoured in lands beyond the furthest of which the Greek geographers had dreamed ! He could not have seen without emotion his name reflected on the waters of the Lough, for the Sophocles ' was already launched. I do not know whether there is a prize poem at the Queen's University, Belfast, but if there is I suggest that the next subject should be " Sophocles at the Island."
And so we glided delicately, passed wonder after wonder, and longed for a Piranesi to do justice to the wondrous architectural and pictorial effects which opened out before us in gigantic rhythm like some vast cinema roll prepared for the Gods in Valhalla. Thus even before we were tied up to the quay there had come part consolation to my fears of disillusionment : " At any rate, this is no mean city. Here is the aura of true greatness. The men who made this place, and who are maintaining and developing it (some of the biggest of the works we had passed were but a year or two old), were born for what is great, not for what is small and sordid. Here is the proud city of self-help. Here is the city which teaches the lesson that commercial prosperity is a thing with which communi- ties cannot be endowed from the top. Belfast was not created by Act of Parliament, or by Orders in Council, or by the patronage of Ministers. It came from within, not from without." Belfast started with no natural advantages whatever. She had no coal ; she had no iron ; she had not even a harbour. Her river is no Shannon or Thames, but a mere stream. The port had to be dug out and dredged out. It is not the gift of nature, but of human energy, and to help this work Belfast got no grants. No • whatever faults Belfast may have, it is not the home of a political and religious clique maintained by favour and injustice. The first political fact that I was to realize on my visit was that in Belfast, though it had so enormously increased in size, in wealth, and in potential energy, the spirit of the people was exactly the same as it was thirty years before. Prosperity had not spoilt Belfast. It had not even becalmed her. She remains, among her countless ships and amid her thousands of busy hammers, the same proud city of the waters, always ready to stretch out her hand in amity, but always ready to guard her independence—not unwilling exactly, but, at any rate, unable to defend herself with words, but perfectly ready to adopt every other means of defence should she be attacked. I could see that her people feel now exactly as they did at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. She and the distriCts round her were then, as now, determined to settle their own fate and not to allow it to be settled for her by the in-.41 of Dublin and the South.
Once more I realized that the true way to make people understand Belfast, and the Irish question, is to say to them what Daniel Webster said so proudly of Massachu- setts : There she is ; behold her, and judge for your selves." I beheld Belfast physically, and I beheld also the spirit of her people, found it as true as ever, and I was satisfied. It is not an intolerant spirit. It is not a persecuting spirit. It is not a sordid nor unjust and ungenerous spirit. It is, however, a determined, a self-confident spirit which knows no doubts—which knows no fears. There is nothing of the Hamlet about the men of Belfast. Their views are not sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought. The animating spirit may seem to the fastidious " unintelligent or unphilosophical or wliat you will, but, at any rate, it is a spirit with which we not only have to deal, but with which we can deal. You know where you are with people who are positive that they are in the right and are not merely feebly trying to fish a relative truth out of a still more relative well.
As for the notion that Belfast Protestants attack their Roman Catholic neighbours out of pure devilry, I feel almost ashamed to meet it, so utterly unjust is it. That the Protestant hits back I have no doubt, and sometimes I dare say hits back unnecessarily hard. I admit that he is intolerant of murder, foul and ruthless, clothed with the alias of " military action." Also I admit that a good deal of ill-feeling has been caused in Belfast by the refusal of the Protestants in the shipyards and in certain factories to work side by side with the Roman Catholics. But who can wonder at it ? Put yourself for a moment in the position of a worker in Harland and Wolff's shipyard, where, if I am not mistaken, there are some 20,000 men at work every day, now all Protestants. Would anyone who reads these lines care to work up in a gantry or on the sides of a vessel on the stocks with a Sinn Feiner beside him and with the thought always present that any day this fellow-worker, though he seems perfectly trustworthy and peaceable, may get an order from some secret society to which he belongs to set fire to the works, to throw a bomb, or do some other act that may involve the loss of hundreds of lives ? Though he may not want to execute this order, there will be a man told off to kill him if he does not execute it. The Sinn Feiner is always between the devil and the deep sea when he is listed for murder or bomb duty. Surely the most stolid worker in the world might be excused for finding such a man a rather nerve-racking colleague.
Remember, once more, it was not the tyrannical employers who refused work to the Sinn Feiners or the sympathizers with Sinn Fein, but the Protestant workers. Taken as a whole, however, there are still plenty of Roman Catholics at work in Belfast in spite of the unpleasant fact that, according to their own political creed, every Sinn Feiner is a potential murderer. Have not their own Church authorities pro- claimed that killing is no murder if you call it an act of war against a tyrant ? I know, of course, that when attention was called in the Spectator to the publication of this doctrine in the Maynooth College official magazine— a periodical with the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Dublin and of the Ecclesiastical Censor—the blame was laid upon the unfortunate printer. Upon such " printers' errors " Belfast not unnaturally smiles. No ; the spirit of Belfast is not bigoted nor unmerciful, though it is practical. Belfast is not going to betray either itself or the United Kingdom.
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