KICKING THE CROWN INTO THE BOYNE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sin,—When Irish Nationalists and English Radicals are anxious to prove that Ulster is disloyal, there is one story that they are fond of telling as evidence of it. In 1867 a "hot- beaded Orangeman" said that if the Irish Church was die. established the King's Crown might be kicked into the Boyne. The story has been repeated several times'in Parliament; by Mr. Birrell (with same additions of his own invention) at a political gathering; at several meetings at the Mansion House in Dublin, and elsewhere in Ireland; and in the Contemporary and other English magazines.
It is interesting to observe how hard up the politicians must be for evidence if a speech made by an obscure member of the party half-a-century ago has to do duty so often. When a Nation- alist newspaper shortly before the war wrote about " the thrice' accursed British Empire "; when an official of the Dublin Corporation urged his audience to aid him in driving the Empire to Hell; when a prominent priest in a caiefully prepared lecture delivered in 1915 said that he looked forward to the time when Ireland would be an independent Republic able to use the harbours as submarine bases from which they could rush out and destroy the commerce of England; when another priest, speaking at the Mansion House in Dublin in 1917 advised people not to invest in the War Loan as it was supplying England with bullets to use against the country towards which Ireland stood in the position of friendlY neutrality—no notice was taken of such remarks; bUt any weapon will do to attack Ulster with.
It is still more interesting to note that in order to make this one piece of evidence available Irish Nationalists and English Radicals are obliged to twist the words irto a sense exactly opposite to that which the speaker intended. For he did not mean that he wished to kick the Crown into the Boyne or to see it kicked; his meaning was that if the Church -was disestablished the ultimate result would be that Ireland would be lost to the British Crown and that the religious liberty secured by the Battle of the Boyne would be lost also. What has been the result of the disestablishmeut it is useless now to inquire; but considering that the large majority of the people in Ireland are now openly in favour of an independent Republic (and expect to get it), and that the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church state that Ireland being a Catholic country must be governed according to Catholic ideas (which means the ideas of James II. and Louis XIV.), it seems that we are approaching the state of things graphically described as kicking the King's Crown into the Boyne.
But what is moat interesting of all Into see the way in which the Radicals ure now inventing a new version of the old yarn. Mr. Sexton, M.P., speaking at Galway on May 26th, said: "A small minority in a corner of Ulster are led by Sir Edward Carson, who not only threatened to kick the King's Crown into the Boyne but headed a rebellion?' So the old tale of fifty years ago is now being attrillitted to Sir Edward Carson! It is about on a par with the myths of his visit to Berlin to confer with the Kaiser in 1914, or the cordial reception given to the German General at Mountstewart in the same year.—
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