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.