A National Protest Meeting against Home Rule was held in
the Albert Hall yesterday week under the joint auspices of the Union Defence League, the Unionist Associations of Ireland, and the Conservative and Unionist Associations of Groat Britain. Mr. Walter Long presided and Sir Edward Carson also spoke; but what lent special significance to the meeting was the presence and the speeches of representatives of the Irish Presbyterians, the loyal Protestants of the South, and of English Nonconformity. Dr. Montgomery, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, who moved the principal resolution, claimed to express the strong conviction of the vast majority of a Church consisting of nearly half a million people that the consequences of Home Rule would be disastrous. The Home Rule Bill, he asserted, placed the control of Ireland's finances in the hands of those who did little or nothing to produce the revenue, seventy-one per cent. of which was contributed by the port of Belfast alone. The Protestant Bishop of Ossory, Dr. Bernard, who bad never before stood on a political platform, observed that it was most of all because Irish loyalists resisted being robbed of any fraction of their Imperial inheritance that they raised their voices. From a selfish point of view Irish loyalists had in the past been too loyal, and lie said with grave delibera- tion that if they were expelled from their citizenship and heritage the mistake of exaggerated loyalty would not be repeated by their sons. Another admirable speech was that of Dr. Watkinson, an ex-President of the Wesleyan Con- ference, who maintained that Nonconformists were not repre- sented either by the Nonconformist M.P.'s or by those Nonconformist divines who figured largely in the controversy, or by the Nonconformist Press, which was largely in the hands of impassioned party politicians.
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