Mr. J. Page Hoppe writes a quaint letter to Monday's
Times, of which the drift is, that the more Ulster threatens and screams that Ulstermen will never transfer their allegiance from the Imperial Parliament to the local Irish Parliament, the more obvious it is that they should be made to do so. "The more they talk of the vast majority of their fellow- countrymen as robbers and oppressors, only waiting their chance to perpetrate every infamy, the more certain is it that they need to be put together into one national council-chamber
charged with the sacred uniting duty of caring for their com- mon home." And yet Mr. Hoppe is one of those who thinks that when the majority of the Irish people, but a small minority of the people of the United Kingdom, threatened and screamed that we were robbers and oppressors, and that they never would voluntarily consent to the infamy of being governed by us, they were absolutely in the right. If the United Kingdom was not "a common home" for Irishmen and Englishmen, why is Ireland a "common home" for Ulstermen and Munstermen ? If the Channel makes the difference, will Mr. Page FIopps insist that local option for Scotland or local option for Wales, is as unprincipled a cry as local option for Ulster ? Or will he say that, though Irish majorities are never tyrannical, English majorities are so given to tyranny, that geographical continuity must not be allowed to determine, in the case of this one island, what the" common home" is to be ?
Previous page
