AN APPEAL TO THE NATIONALISTS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] have read with great and largely sympathetic interest your last week's " Appeal to the Nationalists," and • particularly the speech you write-for an " Irish Cavour,"- addressing the first meet- ing of the Convention. To my thinking that speech is in meet respects admirable. But I must record two impressions of regret.. The first is that the speaker announces the great concession to. Unionist Ulster in a tone of censure and displeasure which seems only too likely to harden opposition. The second impression, and here is a yet graver drawback, in my view, arises from the total absence from the speech of any reference to the scattered Unionists outside Ulster, some of them, by the way, Roman Catholics. But surely they, itany -men, have an imperative claim • to receive large and generous assurances, let me say guarantees, from statesmanlike Nationalists that the new central, authority , shall, to its best, loyally safeguard them from the experience in
the future of " the hard lesson of oppression," social, political, [The Bishop of Durham, no doubt through our fault, not his, misunderstands the attitude which we wished to take up. It must not be supposed for a moment that the Spectator approves of all the words or sentiments put into the mouth of the " Irish Cavour " of its thought. Our object was to suggest what a man of intense Nationalist feeling, who at the same time was a statesman, would have said in the circumstances of the hour. We necessarily envisaged a Roman Catholic and a Celt who had the instinctive feeling of dislike and contempt for the North-East Ulsterman which marks the Celtic Catholic Nationalist. These feelings of dislike and contempt would, however, be kept in bounds by his political acumen and his burning desire to found a real and powerful Irish State. In one opinion, such a man, having decided that he did not " want the Ulster people in," would not mind letting fly at them a little, especially as to do so would help him with his own people. As for any reference to the scattered Unionists, surely the Bishop of Durham will on reflection realize that this great difficulty is Xot one which the " Irish Cavour " would want to dwell upon. If attacked about it, he would of course plead the will of the local majority, just as do the people of North-East Ulster, but until it was raised by somebody else he would rest on the negligible quantity argument, and, as he would say, " the perfect safeguards of the Home Rule Act." Of course the Spectator desires all possible assurances for these Unionists, and would like above all others the assurances provided by the Act of Union. It has, however, been agreed by those who have far more weight in the Unionist Party than we have that the force of circumstances obliges us to give up the maintenance of the Act of Union, provided Nationalist Ireland admits that the will of the local majority shall prevail in North- East Ulster. The Unionist minority in the South must look for protection to the Imperial Parliament and to their Unionist brethren in North-East Ulster, who, remember, will have within their borders a Nationalist and Roman Catholic minority, just as the Dublin Parliament will have under its control a Unionist and Protestant minority. Once again, we repudiate altogether the notion that the speech of the " Irish Cavour " represents our views of the Irish question. What we wanted was to describe, by a dramatic example, how a clever, able, and statesmanlike Nationalist would play his cards. The fact that no one can be found to play them has in truth the most sinister significance for North-East Ulster. It shows, we fear, that Nationalists are thinking snore of dominance and the right to break Protestant and Unionist heads than of the founding of a really stable and self- respecting polity of their own.—ED. Spectator.]
Previous page
