LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE RIGHT OF REBELLION.
[To THE EDITOR OF THZ "SPICTAIOPA1
Srn,—Ulster, according to Mr. Robert Lynd, is actuated by hatred of a "nightmare vision of self-government." What your correspondent fails to see is that, if and when the present Home Rule scheme becomes law, North-East Ulster will not enjoy self-government in any true sense of the word. So far from governing herself she will be governed by a class of men who are her bitter and hereditary opponents : she will be coerced into practically changing her nationality, losing thereby her identity as a powerful organized community with definite ideals of her own fashioning, and becoming instead a mere minor and protesting unit in a political and religious system which on both counts she cordially loathes. Portions of her great wealth will be forcibly taken from her to form the indispensable mainstay of that hated system ; and she will be deprived, sorely against her will, of a political connexion and a citizenship which she greatly prizes, and to which she has hitherto been consistently loyal. This appears to me a curious way of granting self-government to a body of men who only ask to be left as they now are. It is Mr. Lynd's opinion that Ulster does not know what is good for her ; he thinks that she stands to gain as much from Home Rule as any of the other provinces. He may possibly be right. On the other band, it is at least conceivable that the hard-headed Irish loyalists know their own interests, moral and material, in the present emergency quite as well as does your corre- spondent. The "deadly cloud of sectarianism" from which Ulster is alleged to need liberation has not, so far at any rate, availed to blight her prosperity or to arrest her development.
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