DISPIRITED UNIONISTS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " $PEOTATOR.1 Sin,—In the Spectator of March 11th, you speak of the anxious, dispirited, but furious Unionists of Ireland." Anxious, no doubt, we are. "Furious,"—well, I should rather say passionately determined against being sold into slavery. But "dispirited,"—certainly not ! That so well-informed an Englishman as you should so write, is an additional proof of the fact which we Irish Unionists are slowly grasping, that our real danger lies in the almost total ignorance in England of what takes place here. English Unionist papers are writing first-rate articles against Home-rule, but they would do more real service by "crushing out" the articles, if necessary, and using the space so gained for reports of our meetings. How many papers in England gave even a fairly full summary of the speeches made against Home-rule in Grattan's Parliament? Your readers may suspect a slip of the pen there, but there is none. It is simply true that the hundreds of laymen who sit in our General Synod are the nineteenth-century counterpart of their forefathers who composed the Parliament to which Nationalists look back with admiration. Or, again, how many Englishmen have had even the chance of reading the speeches made in Trinity College against the Bill by Professor Dowden, and Dr. Mahaffy, and Professor Cunningham ?—this last a Scotch- man and Gladstonian converted to Unionism by residence in Ireland. Your readers may have some notion of how little "dispirited" we are, from one fact. Last Tuesday, I was present at a Unionist meeting in Waterford,—a stronghold of Nationalism. It was held in the Town Hall, a room which holds nine hundred people. That room was packed long before the proceedings began. Two overflow meetings were organised, at one of which (I did not go to the other) there were over four hundred. We had some capital speeches ; and the tone of the meetings was enthusiastic. You would suppose that a meeting of that character, held in such a neighbourhood, would have attracted great attention from the Irish Unionist Press. Not at all. So common are such meetings now, that, though the Irish Titnes and Daily Express gave, no doubt, as much space as they could afford, the reports were so condensed that, unless one had been present, one could not realise how successful the meeting had been. Why, indeed, should we be "dispirited," when we see that the nominal supporters of the Bill here cannot say a word in its defence, and when all the enthusiasm, as well as argument and honest conviction, is on our own side P—I am, Sir, &c., H. VERB WHITE.
All Saints' Rectory, Waterford, March 18th.
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