14 OCTOBER 1922, Page 2

We cannot help, however, carrying this argument a step further

and making a few comments on a subject which lay wholly outside the scope of the Lord Mayor's speech. If destitute, ill-used and starving people should command our help and sympathy wherever they may be, what about the unhappy and brutally Ill-used victims Jr land ? We are asked to send help to the Volga and Asia - , and it is right

that we should be asked. But how is it that there is no organization of popular movements in the interests of the ruined and bereaved Irish loyalists ? The explanation is no doubt that the politics of the question touch us too nearly. The reason, in short, for doing nothing is the very reason which we have deprecated in the case of the foreign sufferers. Surely this state of things is not merely an illogicality but a disgrace. Our ships of war rush to the rescue in foreign waters. They are forbidden to do so in our home waters. There is a con- spiracy of silence. But let us be sure of this, that the Irish loyalist whose house has been burnt down, whose property has been confiscated beyond hope of redress, and who is now a pauper refugee, suffers just as much as a citizen of Smyrna or a peasant of the Volga.