From The Fortnightly Review. years some £75,000 worth of gold has been taken from the Wicklow hills, and Mr. Parnell devoted much time and money to the task of discovering still more, but nothing has come of it. Within the memory of middle-aged men, the copper mines round about Skibbereen were raising fifty thousand tons per year. In 1883 this had sunk to the pitiful figure of one hundred and eighty-three tous; now, save for a little barytes work, the mines are closed altogether. It is no longer worth the while of any one in Ireland to dig underground. Of all the innumerable altars dedicated to Irish saints in Ireland, scarcely one is of Irish marble. Though their own hills abound in some of the most beautiful colored veins in the world, the builders of Irish churches find it cheaper to bring marble from Belgium and Italy. one There is a reason for all this which would remain sufficient even if Irish coal were as good as Durham, and Irish iron as Derbyshire — and this takes us at a step to the most conspicuous feature in the material existence of the Ireland of to-day. IRELAND is by nature a poor country. Its very conformation, shaped as it is like a basin, with an elevated outer rim of mountains and highlands sloping inward to a broad expanse of low, wet land, makes drainage a more important and difficult problem than it is in any other civilized country. A resourceful and indefatigable race like the Dutch, given complete mastery of themselves, would perhaps have satisfactorily solved this problem. What the Irish, under like conditions, might have done with it no one can say. At all events the problem remains to this day, complicating and embarrassing husbandry over something like a half of the cultivated area of the island. The very first glimpses of Ireland which history affords shows us Mediterranean voyagers seeking it out for its metallic ores. To-day, after a lapse of a score of centuries, the question of Ireland's mineral wealth is almost wholly one of speculation. We know that the island contains coal. The united coal-fields of Leinster are stated to cover sixty-one thousand four hundred and forty acres, Our common belief is that Ireland is those of Tyrone seventeen thousand governed by Parliament at Westminsacres, of the Lough Allen district ter, operating through the chief secretwenty thousand acres; the estimated tary and his official machinery radiating. supply of them all is put by the statisti- from Dublin Castle. That is a governcians at two hundred and nine million ment which counts for very little. The tons. The figures look well, but the true control of Ireland as a whole is fact remains that Ireland's greatest vested in a Parliament which no one modern annual output of coal never hears of, whose monthly sessions noreached more than one sixteen hun-body reports; I mean the "Conferdredth part of the total production of ence" of representatives of the Irish the United Kingdoms for the year, and railway and steamship lines. These it was very bad coal at that. Much the are the real rulers of the island. same is to be said of iron, copper, and the more precious metals. Time has been when they played a relatively prominent part in the industrial affairs of the island. A large portion of the once splendid forests of Ireland are known to have been cut down to afford fuel for the smelting of native iron. With the disappearance of the wood the work languished, and now only one or two of the Antrim mines are kept open at all. During the past hundred In these days there is no country which regards its magnates of transportation and their methods with unmixed approval. But in every other land the grumbler at least recognizes that the shield has a reverse; if there are bad things to be said about the railways, he admits that there are also good things. In Ireland alone there seems to be no single word of praise found or deserved. Nowhere else has the great genie which George Stephen son unloosed, and which now bestrides The railways of Ireland do not comand sways our very existence, behaved pete with one another at any point. so badly. Each little company is undisputed mas as Perhaps there may be somewhere ter in its own district, carrying as big else in Turkey, possibly, or Para- and costly an official directorate guayas unintelligent and perversely would suffice to manage a great English harmful a railway management as that line, and confining itself to the task of under the blight of which Ireland levying enough taxation upon the trade withers. But if there is, it is practised and travel of its province to pay its in a remote and unimportant quarter, salaries and provide a dividend. among a people to whom steam is an The theory of doing anything to indifferent superfluity. But Ireland augment this trade and travel is unlies within sight of the busiest indus- known. No idea exists save to put as trial hive on earth; is an associate, heavy a toll as possible upon everyafter a fashion, in the largest manufac- thing and everybody appearing at the turing firm the world has ever known. station. Although there is combinaFor her to be badly served by the agent tion between the lines to protect their which the others employ to such tre- common monopoly, it does not extend mendous advantage, is to be helplessly to the point of making an intelligible trampled under foot by her partners. railway system for the whole island. And she has been, and is being, thus Each railway preserves an apparent trampled well-nigh to death. indifference as to whether its trains connect with those of its neighbors. The wayfarer must take his chance at each junction and his patronage of the buffet at the station while he waits is deliberately counted upon as an asset in the arrangement. On the same theory no morning trains are run in the interior early enough to carry the farmer to the fair; the notion being to compel him to leave home the previous evening and spend the night in the market-town, to the profit of the railway's hotel interests. It seems hardly credible, but in Ireland a man cannot send goods by one invoice over more than one line. He cannot even obtain an idea of the probable cost of the whole at any one place, but must make his own inquiries, contracts, and payments wherever the goods in transit pass from one line to another. We have all heard until we are tired of the Irish industries destroyed by ancient penal laws, or by the more modern Act of Union. Why does not some one catalogue the industries of yesterday which to-day are only memories - crushed out by the Irish railways? In just a single department, take the list of tanning, saddlery, the hides and leather, the making of soap and candles, of boots and shoes by wholesale, of buttons and other bone work, and of horn combs. These are all things which Ireland could well do, and, indeed, less than fifty years ago did do. She may not do them now, because the railways, the Dublin cattlemen, and the steamer lines combine to decree that all Ireland's huge export supply of live-stock shall be sent across the Irish Sea on the hoof. An attempt was made ten years back to establish The most superficial glance at the abattoirs in Ireland, and to ship only local goods rates charged by these railthe dressed meat to England in refrig-ways sets one to marvelling that people erator-cars and cold-chamber vessels. This can be profitably done from beyond the Mississippi, from the river Plate, and far New Zealand; it could not be done from Ireland. The combination described above made no secret of its methods in crushing the enterprise, and since 1884 no one has had the courage to repeat the experiment. in Ireland still try to carry on any business at all. To bring a bullock by rail from Cork to Dublin costs 17s. 9d., while to send him on from Dublin to Manchester costs only 9s. 8d. It is cheaper to transport a bullock from Montreal to Bristol than from Kilkenny to Bristol. The charge upon a ton of butter from Tralee to Cork (eighty-three miles) is £1 2s. 6d. It bitter despite of the obstacles put in can be sent in the other direction from Fermoy to Liverpool viâ Dublin (two hundred and ninety-nine miles) for £1 13s. 4d. To haul a ton of Irish pork from Dungannon to Belfast (forty miles) costs 15s. 10d.; the carriage of a ton of American bacon back from Belfast to Dungannon is only 10s. Bricks can be landed from England in Dublin at a smaller charge for transportation than is made from the brickyards at King's Court, fifty miles away, and directly on the railway line. A barrel of flour can be brought from Chicago one thousand miles by rail and three thousand by water, and landed at Liverpool, for less money than it costs to bring it from Londonderry to Manchester. The railway charge for a ton of apples from Armagh to Belfast (thirty miles) is 12s. 6d. The same apples can be carried from Liverpool to Lisbon (1,147 miles) for 21s. It only costs a little over twice as much to bring a barrel of fish from Sacramento, Cal., to London as it does to bring one from Galway to London. their path by the railways. The export of cattle and sheep, though not what it was, remains Ireland's most important trade. How little the railways are to be thanked for this has been hinted at above. Take here the further fact that, from the chief cattle fair at Ballinasloe, by rail some ninety miles west of Dublin, the drovers prefer to spend five days along the road driving their herds afoot, rather than pay the extortionate toll of £2 5s. per truck demanded by the railway. They manage these things better, I believe, in eastern Roumelia. In every other civilized country the railway management recognizes, if not a duty then an interest, in bringing the producing interior into as close contact as may be with the seaports. English lines make equal rates to any group of competing ports. France does this from the provinces to Havre, Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. The lowland kingdoms keep a careful eye upon cheap traffic facilities to Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, and Germany does the same in the interest of These figures, taken at random from Hamburg, Bremen, Lubeck, and DantDr. Bowles-Daly's book, tell a story zic. It is only in Ireland that the effort not to be matched anywhere, I think, to send goods to the seaboard is penalamong nations. They happen to touch ized. The whole rich dairy district of upon some half-dozen departments of the Blackwater has been driven out of industry, three of which have been lit- the butter-making industry because erally stamped out by them. To enu- the charge for carriage from Fermoy to merate the other trades, industries, and Cork (thirty-eight miles) was put at the divisions of productive and mercantile wanton figure of 15s. 6d. per tou. The activity that have been discouraged, enterprising men who planted the fruit crippled, destroyed by what passes for orchards in Armagh were similarly railway management in Ireland, would broken. The demanded railway charge be to make a catalogue of practically all for conveyance to Belfast, thirty miles the helpful things Irishmen have tried away, was 12s. 6d. per ton — and it was to do in their own country for the past cheaper not to grow fruit at all. The thirty years. In only one or two great flax-raising industry, which we carry in branches of trade does Ireland to-day our minds as one of Ireland's principal make any show of holding her own. assets, has been destroyed in much the The peculiar long, thin, sweet-meated same way. Belfast and the other Ulspig which gets just fat enough for per- ter factory towns get nearly all their fect bacou, and firmly refrains from flax now from the Continent and the overstepping the border line of gluttony West Indies. Why? It costs 21s. 8d. into hogdom, is still a unique Irish pos- to bring a ton of flax by rail eighty-six session; but the chief factors of Lim-miles, from Stranorlar in Donegal to erick and Waterford will with one voice Belfast; the combined railway and seatell you that they maintain their place in borne charge from Ghent is only 18s. the markets of the world only in sheer 8d. In other countries, too, there ex ists a theory that cheap transportation | cannot do better than to take the case of raw materials from the seaboard to of Mountmelick, in Queen's County, inland manufacturing points is good which sixty years ago was a remarkbusiness. This writ of common sense ably favorable specimen of a Quaker does not run in Ireland. It has come settlement-cleanly, well-ordered, innow to be the melancholy case that, dustrious, and frugal. The Friends in save for flax and a little silk, no raw Ireland lived on exceptionally amiable material whatsoever is landed at any terms with their Papist neighbors, and Irish port. True, none is needed now, at Mountmelick they gave employment for there are no manufactories in the to not only those of the town, but of interior. But this is an effect, not a the whole surrounding district. The cause. The mills and factories may be place still retains its predominant seen, roofless and deserted, on the Quaker element, and is still one of the banks of every little stream in western most orderly and self-sufficing of Irish and mid Ireland. . The railways would communities. It happens that Lewis's not bring grist to these mills save at "Topographical History of Ireland" prohibitive prices. They prefer to distribute the flour and yellow meal ground in Milwaukee - the while the very meaning of the word "miller" is losing its meaning to the Irish mind, as the term "loriuer" has done with you in England. To summarize the effects of Ireland's railway system upon an inland town, we gave, in 1837, a specially detailed survey of the industries of the town. Let me rescue from the obscurity of a bluebook the report of Assistant-Commissioner O'Brien, C.B., to the Royal Commission on Labor, on the state of Mountmelick in May, 1893, and put the two together for purposes of comparison: 3. Two woollen factories, employing 1,800 3. One frieze factory of 19 looms, only 9 ditto. working, employing 30 hands. 4. Iron and brass foundry and engine 4. Machinery repairing shop-14 hands. These contrasted figures, bear in |ness to. We see this busy and prosmind, have nothing to do with old perous town, the centre of nearly a trade-discrimination laws, or the Act of dozen diversified industries, at a time Union, or any branch of the great agra- when the railway era was dawning in rian dispute. They tell the story of Ireland. Now, after half a century of a town on a railway fifty miles from railway domination, we find it shorn of Dublin, largely peopled and quite con- nearly half its population, with no introlled by a class whose energy, cour-dustries save three petty establishments age, thrift, and other sterling qualities overshadowed by the malthouse of a your whole industrial north bears wit-Dublin brewery, and with the army of four thousand workers in and about its | ashore only such mackerel as have walls whittled down to a beggarly cor- been partially gnawed by the dog-fish poral's guard of less than one hundred which swarm about the nets, biting off and fifty. If a strong and flourishing protruding tails and heads. The poor Quaker community could be thus re- little attempts at a canning or curing duced and broken, what chance has industry at Baltimore and Youghal are there been for the less skilled and hardly to be mentioned seriously. Ireless substantial efforts of other Irish land is supposed to consume £500,000 towns? Nay, what chance will ever worth of fish annually, and quite half come to them again? this money she expends in importations from abroad-the while millions of tons lie in the waters at her door, and other millions rot as compost on her remoter shores, because the railways will not carry fish save at a thirty per cent. excess rate, and meet all suggestions of depôts, refrigerator-cars, a central market system, and the like, with ~ deadly non possumus. The most considerable mischief wrought by these railways has not yet been touched upon — I mean their attitude toward the fisheries of the south and west coasts. This is a subject on which so much has been said that it need have only brief notice here. Able and devoted men like Sir Thomas Brady and the late Father Davis have worn their hearts out in working, pleading, declaiming in honest rage to very little purpose. The fish are there, and so are the fishermen, but they are almost as useless as the tube and pedestal of a telescope without lenses. Londoners pay two or three shillings apiece for lobsters. Ten thousand lobsters could be brought into the railway yards on the Galway, Kerry, and Mayo coasts, cach week in the season, at a comfortable profit for sixpence each. I have myself bought one in a village a few miles from Westport for a penny. But the railway charges for transportation across the width of the island - ranging from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty-five miles - makes the west coast lobster cost practically as much in Dublin as his North Sea or Channel cousin does in London. There is, it is true, a certain activity in the mackerel fisheries at Baltimore, Crookhaven, and Kinsale, but here, as elsewhere, it is as independent of the railways as if George Stephenson had never been born. These harbors are thronged with the steam-vessels of buyers-vessels from Liverpool, from Bristol, from Barnstaple, from Greenock, from the Isle of Mau- and the yield of the nets, bought at prices fixed by others than Irishmen, is hurried away across the waters to English, Scotch, Manx, and even Scandinavian ports. The fishermen bring empires Every tourist returning from Ireland carries with him a recollection of the exorbitant charges, the ill-timed trains, the absurd absence of intelligent connections, which characterize the management of Irish railways. He is right in his conclusion that this is one of the principal reasons why tourists systematically avoid Ireland. But he may go further and believe that the discouragement of tourist traffic is a mere drop in the ocean of disasters with which this management has flooded the island. The eye dims with tears at the unhappy spectacle — thousands of good acres going annually out of cultivation; an incessant stream of the young and the able-bodied headed for Queenstown or Galway to take ship; whole countrysides dotted with roofless cottages; once populous towns shrunk into squalid shelters for the crippled, diseased, vicious, and incompetent residuum which remain; a deserted people, conscious of being a bedraggled and tattered shadow of their former selves, loafing or pottering about among their ruins with a shamefaced bravado, wearing shoddy English clothes, reading the lowest and flashiest English trash, singing the London music-hall songs of last year, trying in a hundred pitiful ways to make themselves believe that they are really a nation, a co-partner in the greatest of modern one cannot but be moved at |