quished of the Boyne" his arrangements are so made,
he says, as to prevent the development of anything like the outbreaks of
former years.

On the advice of Sir John Preston I shall take the Fleetwood route on my
return to London to-night.

This secures one a comfortable night on board of a very good and
well-equipped boat, from which you go ashore, he tells me, into an
excellent station of the London and North-Western Railway at Fleetwood,
on the mouth of the Wyre on the Lancashire coast. Twenty years ago this
was a small bathing resort called into existence chiefly by the
enterprise of a local baronet whose name it bears. Its present
prosperity and prospective importance are another illustration of the
vigour and vitality of the North of Ireland, which is connected through
Fleetwood with the great manufacturing regions of middle and northern
England, as it is through Larne with the heart of Scotland.

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
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 c