TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ULSTER PROBLEM.
IN the course of his speech on the Address, Mr. Bonar Law asked some exceedingly pertinent questions in regard to the Home Rule Bill promised by the Govern- ment. We regret to see, however, that he omitted from his interrogatories the most important question of all. He did not press the Government to say how they mean to deal with the problem of Ulster. Yet this is a question which, in our opinion, is absolutely vital, not merely because of the great consequences directly involved, but even more because it is through pressing this question that the people of the United Kingdom can be most easily made to see that, much as they might like out of friendliness and good- will to their fellow subjects in the South of Ireland to grant some form of Home Rule, they cannot do so without causing grave injustice to the North of Ireland. If the question, " What are you going to do about Ulster ? " is pushed home, the whole of the foundations of rhetoric, sentiment, and party convenience upon which the Home Rule edifice is built up crumble to nothing. The truth is that the Government, or, indeed, any one who answers that question honestly, must give one of two replies. Either they must say something which will make their Home Rule Bill unworkable, or, at any rate, so unaccept- able to the South of Ireland that the Nationalists would reject it with scorn and indignation, or else they must give an answer which is not only patently unjust to the people of the North, but utterly destructive of the whole principle upon which the Bill proceeds—the principle of yielding to the wishes of a local majority. If the Government were to say : " We will let any county of Ulster, the majority of whose people object to being turned out of the United Kingdom, remain as an integral portion of the United Kingdom as now," the Home Rule Bill would, as wo have said, be at once rejected by the Nationalists. If, on the other hand, the Government were to say : " We do not propose to pay any attention to the will of the local majority in the North ; they must be governed and controlled by the will of the people of the South," what becomes of the principle of self-government which, we are told, ought to be applied to the Irish—the principle which, further, we are told will bring contentment to the discontented parts of Ireland, and need not produce any disintegrating results in our legislative or adminis- trative machinery ? From such a reply as that they are estopped by every speech and every leading article written in favour of Home Rule. In truth, when the Liberals are pressed on this point they are very much in the position of the Pharisees of old. If they agree that the local majorities in Ulster ought to be consulted as to the system of local government applicable to them they fear the multitude, i.e., the Nationalists. If they say Ulster local majorities have no right to any such consideration, they blow up the foundations of their own Bill, for the country will never be satisfied with the assertion that there is something which makes Home Rule principles inapplicable to the case of Ulster and Ireland, though those principles must be applied to the case of Ireland and the United Kingdom with the utmost rigour. In truth, if the Ulster question is pressed, Liberals can only hang their heads and, as we have said, answer like the Pharisees : " We cannot tell what to say." Here, then, as we have said a hundred times, is the opportunity of the Unionist Party. Lot us Unionists press the question for all we are worth. If wo do, the country will realize that the only way in which the demands of the Nationalists can be granted without com- mitting a gross and patent injustice is to grant a form of Home Rule which the Nationalists themselves will not accept ! But the realization of the impossibility of passing a Home Rule Bill leads at once to the very core and essence of the Unionist policy. The Union under which the three Kingdoms are incorporated into one indivisible Kingdom is the only farm of government consistent with the safety and welfare of these Islands and the just government of Ireland. As we have said before, the Union was not established by Pitt in levity, or in wickedness, or by accident. It was reluctantly brought about by that great statesman because every other form of adjusting the relations between the two islands had been tried and had completely broken down. The limited Home Rule which Ireland enjoyed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a source of misery to her- self and anxiety and confusion to us. The unlimited Home Rule of Grattan's Parliament, under which the only tie between the two countries was a, common Crown, was equally disastrous to Ireland, and ended in a welter of blood and horror in which the cruelties and outrages were equally divided between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics, the loyalists and the disloyalists. Then Pitt in despair tried an incorporating Union, and from that moment things began to improve, though no doubt slowly, until at last the island has reached a condition of prosperity such as it has never before enjoyed in its history. When compared with any other system of governing Ireland which has ever been put into practice, the Union must be pronounced an astonishing success. There has been a certain amount of rioting and disorder, no doubt, since its passage, but such disorders have been as nothing compared with the dis- orders of previous generations. "But," it may be pleaded, " there is the terrible fact of the famine staring you in the face. How do you get over that ? " No doubt the famine is a terrible fact ; but those who are always dwelling on it forget that, before the Union, famines in Ireland. did not occur once in a century, but every ten or fifteen years. Indeed, the famine of 1847 was in one sense due to the bettor government of Ireland produced by the Union. Instead of periodic famines, revolts, and disorders keeping down the population as before, the population rapidly increased—much too (rapidly for the resources of the country. Instead of the people of Ireland emigrating or establishing industries for themselves, as they did in England and Scotland—no obstacles after the Union were placed in the way of such establishment—the people of Ireland, having unfortunately then a very low standard of living, attempted to live and bring up families upon potato plots which in the best of times could only just support them, and which in bad seasons were of necessity the homes of starvation. Famine must have overtaken any population, no matter where situated, which attempted to live as did a large section of the Irish people during the first forty years of the internal peace and quiet produced by the Union.
During the last fifty years the progress of Ireland has been steady and continuous. Take, for example, Belfast and the surrounding districts. Here the ratio of material de- velopment has been perhaps higher than in any other part of the United Kingdom. But remember this has not been in the least due to any help on the part of the Government. Instead of specially favouring Belfast as a Protestant city, it is not too much to say that Government help and Government money, which has been so freely, though, we fear, not always very successfully, employed in Ireland, has entirely missed Belfast. Belfast is what its own people have made it, and if the people of Cork, or Limerick, or any other city in the south had cared to do what the people of Belfast have done for themselves, no human being could have prevented them. They had their fate in their own hands exactly as had the people in Belfast. In truth the allegation that we, the people of England, are responsible for whatever misery and poverty there may be in the South of Ireland is a gross and palpable falsehood. During the last hundred and thirty years we have done nothing to prevent the internal growth of Ireland, and the proof of this fact is to be found in the development of Belfast. That development is no doubt hateful to the Nationalists because it pricks the bubbles of rhetoric and false sentiment which they love to blow. Nevertheless it remains to prove that under the Union every Irishman who cared to use it has had as fair a chance as any Englishman or Scotsman to improve his own condition.
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