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 Vendee 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.