inen. But what about her home trade?
Would not Belfast be even more prosperous if she could clothe Ireland
too?--if Ireland could afford to put aside her rags and replace them
with "purple and fine linen" from the factories of the North?

Might not Belfast, in that case, be able not merely to enrich her
merchants but to raise the social conditions of her own people? For it
is unhappily the case that the researches of the Women's Trade Unions
have disclosed in Belfast conditions of sweated labour that have
surprised and alarmed even the most hardened investigators. The lofty
buildings and humming mills of Belfast are revealed to be resting on a
swamp of social misery. Nor is this at all remarkable, for the mass of
the people are kept helpless and divided by their religious divisions,
which are too often used as a weapon to prevent them from combining for
higher wages and shorter hours. Religious fanaticism is not quite so
self-sacrificing in its commercial results as superficial observers
might suppose.

It is impossible, indeed, that Belfast can continue for ever in a
prosperity isolated and aloof from the country in which she is
situated. Either she must throw in her lot with Ireland or Ireland must
drag Ireland down into one common pit of adversity. Lord Pirrie, the
enterprising and fearless director of the great shipbuilding works on
Queen's Island--works which maintained their pre-eminence and continued
their output through the dark days of the shipbuilding trade on the
Clyde and the Thames--has been converted to Home Rule. Other business
men will follow his example, for Belfast, as much as any other town in
Ireland, suffers in Private Bill legislation from the remoteness of the
Legislature and the Administration. She, too, has too often to endure a
financial policy not suited to her needs. She, like the rest of
Ireland, has everything to gain and nothing to lose by a policy that
will enable Ireland to obtain legislation better fitted to the needs of
the Irish people.

In spite, indeed, of her outcries, Ulster has already gained more from
the policy of the Nationalists at Westminster than from that of the
Orange reactionaries who represent half the province at Westminster.
Those Orangemen have identified the robust Radicalism and
Presbyterianism of Ulster with the narrowest demands of the Anglican
landlords and Tories of England. Happily for Ulster, they have been
defeated. The farmers of Ulster are at present bu