SNIPPET: Margaret Dixon McDOUGALL (1826-1898), was brought up in the north of Ireland by "the strictest of conservatives," went to live in White River, Ontario and then Michigan, writing novels and poetry. She never lost her love of Ireland and returned in the early 1880s on a visit, after which she espoused the cause of Irish nationalism after revisiting her homeland. This book is based on a collection of her letters about Ireland circa 1882. Here is a small excerpt: "Down in the North the loyalty is intense and loud. An opinion favorable to the principles of the Land League it would be hardly prudent to express. Any dissatisfaction with anything at all is seldom expressed for fear of being classed with these troublers of Ireland. The weather is very inclement, and has been ever since I landed. Snow, rain, hail, sleet, hard frost, mud, have alternated. Some days have been one continuous storm of either snow or sleet. The roads through Antrim are beautifully clean and neat, not only on the line of rail but along the country roads inland. The land is surely beautiful, exceedingly, and kept like a garden. The number of houses of some, nay of great, pretensions, is most astonishing. Houses set in spacious and well-kept grounds, with porter lodges, terraced lawns, conservatories, &c., abound. They succeed one another so constantly that one wonders how the land is able to bear them all, or by what means such universal grandeur is supported. There is an outcry of want, of very terrible hard times, but certainly the country shows no signs thereof. The great wonder to me is where the laborers who produce all this neatness and beauty live? Where are the small farmers on whom the high rent presses so heavily? Few houses, where such could by any possibility be housed, are to be seen from the roadside. There are so very few cottages and so very many gentlemen's houses that I am forced to believe that the peasantry have almost entirely disappeared. Yet I know there must be laborers somewhere to keep the place so beautiful. Ballymena, always a bustling place, has spread itself from a thriving little inland town into a large place of some 8,000 inhabitants. Notwithstanding the depression in the linen trade, this town presents a thriving, bustling appearance as it has always done. The number of whiskey shops is something dreadful. The consumption of that article must be steady and enormous to support them. There is squalor enough to be seen in the small streets of this town, but that is in every town. The public road from Ballymena to Grace Hill passes through the Galgorm estate which passed from the hands of its last lord, through the Encumbered Estates Court, into the hands of its present proprietor. On this estate a most wonderful change has been effected, and in a short space of time to effect so much. During the old regime, and the good old times of absentee landlordism, squalor and misery crept up to the castle gates. The wretchedness of the tenants could be seen by every passer-by. The peasantry tell of unspeakable orgies held at the castle even upon the Sabbath day. The change is something miraculous. The waste pasture-like demesne is reclaimed and planted. The worst cabins have entirely disappeared; the rest are improved till they hardly know themselves. They match the new cottages for which the proprietor took a prize. These little homes with their climbing plants, their trim little gardens, look as if any one might snuggle down in any of them and be content. The castle itself looks altered; it has lost its grim Norman look, and stands patriarchal and fatherly among the beautiful homes it has created. Not far from the castle gate is a pretty church and its companion, an equally pretty building for the National School. I enquired of several how this great improvement came about; the answer was always the same, 'The estate passed into the hands of a good man who lived on it, and he had a godly wife.' Passing the pretty little church I heard the sound of children's voices singing psalms, and was told that the daughter of the castle was teaching the children to sing; I noticed In Memoriam on a stone in the building, and found that this church was built in memory of the good lady of the castle, who has departed to a grander inheritance, leaving a name that lingers like a blessing in the country side. So the old landlord's loss of an estate has been great gain to this people. It is in the country parts, more remote from the public eye, that one sees the destitution wrought by the depression in the linen trade. People there are struggling with all their might to live and keep out of the workhouses. Hand-loom weaving seems doomed to follow hand-spinning and become a thing of the past. Weavers some time ago had a plot of ground which brought potatoes and kale to supplement the loom, and on it could earn twelve shillings a week. But alas! while the webs grew longer the price grew less and they are in a sad case. I called, with a friend, on some of these weavers: one, an intelligent man, with the prevailing Scotch type of face. We found him, accompanied by a sickly wife, sitting by a scanty fire, ragged enough. This man for his last web was paid at the rate of twopence a yard for weaving linen with twenty hundred threads to the inch, but out of this money he had to buy dressing and light, and have some one, the sickly wife I suppose, to wind the bobbins for him. He must then pay rent for the poor cabin he lived in, none too good for a stable, and supply all his wants on the remainder. Another weaver told me that all this dreary winter they had no bed-clothes. They think by combining together they will be able to obtain better prices; but they are so poor, the depression in the trade is such a fearful reality that I am afraid they cannot combine or co-operate to any purpose. However, people in such desperate circumstances grasp at any hope. It is wonderful with what disfavor some of these people receive a hint of emigration. It seems like transportation to them. Truly these Irish do cling to the soil. The weavers seem to blame the manufacturers for the reduction of wages. They complain that the trade is concentrated into a few hands; that therefore they cannot sell where they can sell dearest, but are obliged to take yarn from a manufacturer and return it to him in cloth. They complain that he still further reduces the poor wage by fines. As many of these have only a hut but no garden ground, they have nothing to fall back on. There are many suffering great want, and with inherited Scotch reticence suffering in silence. There may be some injustice and some oppression, for that is human nature, but the hand-loom weaving is doomed to disappear, I am afraid. There are some complaints of the high price of land here, and of the hard times for farmers, but there is no appearance of hard times. Laborers are cheap enough. One shilling a day and food, or ten shillings a week without food, seems to be the common wage. The people of Down and Antrim, as far as I have gone, are rampantly loyal to Queen and Government and to all in authority. If a few blame the manufacturers, or think the land is too dear, the large majority blame the improvidence of the poor. 'They eat bacon and drink tea where potatoes and milk or porridge and milk used to be good enough for them.' It is difficult to imagine the extravagance. I went through part of the poor-house in Ballymena. It is beautifully clean and sweet, and in such perfect order out and in that one is glad to think of the sick or suffering poor having such a refuge. What fine, patient, intelligent faces were among the sufferers in the infirmary. The children in the school-room looked rosy and well-fed, and the babies were nursed by the old women. So many of them--it was a sad sight indeed."