nd South--that is a more difficult gulf to bridge, for the one I
have been speaking of is only a breach to repair. But industrial
Protestant Ulster and the rest of Ireland have never really been one.
Unity there has not to be re-established, but created. Martin Ross went
to the North only once "at the tremendous moment of the signing of the
Ulster Covenant," and she was profoundly impressed by what she saw. She
wrote about it publicly and she wrote also privately (in a letter which
I had the honour to receive) a passage well worth quoting:--

I did not know the North at all. What surprised me about the place
was the feeling of cleverness and go, and also the people struck me
as being hearty. If only the South would go up North and see what
they are doing there, and how they are doing it, and ask them to
show them how, it would make a good deal of difference. And then
the North should come South and see what nice people we are, and
how we do that.

When that reciprocal pilgrimage was accomplished by the Convention, her
anticipations were more than justified. But how clever she was! In a
flash, she, coming there a stranger, hits on the word which describes
Ulster and differentiates it from the rest of Ireland. "Hearty," that is
what they are; it is the good side of their self-content. No people that
is in revolution can be hearty--least of all when revolution has dragged
on through more than a generation. Distrust of your comrades--distrust
of your leaders--self-distrust--these are the characteristic vices of
revolution (look at Russia), and they sow a bitter seed. Protestant
Ulster has never known revolution; for it yesterday and to-day have been
happily, naturally, continuous. Political change it has known, normal
and beneficent; land purchase came to Ulster as a by-product of what the
rest of Ireland endured in torment, and agony, and self-mutilation.
Clever the Northerns are, but their cleverness issues prosperously in
action; they carry on in a solidly-established order; they have not
needed to break down before they could begin to build. That is why their
heartiness stood out when they were assembled, as I have seen them in a
common council of Irishmen, which was also, thank heaven, a
companionship. But the world at large can see it exhibited in another
way. Contrast the work of the Ulster Players with that of the Abbey
Theatre. _The Drone_ is perhaps not the best of new Irish come