For good and sufficient reasons the railway carriage whisked through
the rich country, carrying me from Castle Bellingham to Rath Cottage by
the Moat of Dunfane. There is one beautiful difference between the North
and the West; the North is full of people, the hill sides are dotted
thickly with white dwellings--so much for the Ulster Custom. It pleases
the people to tell them that the superior prosperity of their northern
fields is due to their religious faith. Some parts of Lord Mount
Cashel's estate, when sold in the Encumbered Estates Court, did not pass
into hands governed by the same opinions as to the rights and duties
which property confers as are held by Mr. Young, of Galgorm Castle.
Their tenants complain of rack rents as bitterly as if they lived in the
west. They are looking eagerly to the new law for redress. In fact when
they find their tenant-right eaten up by a vast increase of rent they
consider their faith powerless in the face of their landlord's works.
I do not think any one can pass through this country without noticing a
vast difference which is not a religious difference, between one
property as to management and another, between one part of the country
and another. In some parts the tenants build the houses, whatever sort
of houses they are able to build; they repair them as they are able, and
the landlords get the rent of them. If by any means they can improve
them, the landlord improves the rent to a higher figure.
I was over one property in the County Antrim, the property of a man who
combines landholding as a middleman, with trade in linen fabrics and
manufacturing or bleaching, or both. I cannot say that this gentleman is
excessively popular, but he is exceedingly prosperous. His private
residence, as far as taste goes, a taste that can be gratified
regardless of expense, is as perfectly beautiful within its limits as
the property of any lord of the soil which I have come across. Indeed,
the arrangements made at such cost, kept up to such perfection, spoke of
one who owed his income to trade and not to his land alone. His hot-
houses, heavy with grapes, rich with peaches and nectarines, and
fragrant with rare flowers, were verily on a lordly scale. It was his
tenement houses that attracted my attention chiefly. They were well-
roofed, slated in almost every instance; not a roof was broken that he
owned. The cottages were rough cast and washed over with drab; they were
covered with roses that were in as rich bloom as if they were blooming
for gentry. Truly the tenants planted them, but a tenant who plants
roses is not living in a state of desperation as to the means of
existence. When he sent men to wash over the tenement houses, and the
good wives trembled for the roses. "The gardener shall come and arrange
them again and see that they are not harmed in the least," he said.
They tell me that this gentleman, being a trader with a commercial mind,
takes for his tenements the utmost they will bring. If so, when he
builds the houses, and keeps them in thorough repair, it is surely doing
what he will with his own. Others who do not build, who never repair,
surely raise the rent on what is, strictly and honestly speaking, not
their own.
There is a difference between this gentleman, whose tenants say, "He
will send his own gardener to fix up the roses again after the white, or
rather gray washing," and the lord in the West whose tenants say, "If he
saw a patch of flowers at the door, he would compel us to grub it up as
something beyond our station."
The agent on the Galgorm estate told me that during twenty-five years,
when he was in Lord Mount Cashel's land office, there was but one
eviction, and that man got four hundred pounds for his tenant right
before he left the yard. This is one man's testimony of one landlord.
Ulster, as a whole, has had more evictions, pending the Land Bill, than
any other of the provinces. It is true that she has more people to
evict. Her rent-roll during the last-eighty years has risen from
L124,481 to L1,440,072. One million, three hundred and fifteen thousand
five hundred and ninety one pounds of a rise.