At a time when the controversy as to what Irish
boycotting really means, is so bitter, everybody should read Mr. T. W.
Rolleston's answer to Mr. S. Laing's discreditable apology for it. Mr. Rolleston is not a Unionist, but a Nationalist. He has been a strong supporter of Home-rule, and would still be a strong supporter of it, if he could find a party to defend it in the old style in which Gavan Duffy and Thomas Davis advocated the Nationalist cause forty years ago. But he feels for boycotting as it is actually practised in Ireland, the sort of profound loathing which every honourable man feels for a practice that is destroying the mutual confidence of neighbours and friends throughout a peasantry of warm-hearted but morally timid, not to say morally cowardly temperament, and he denounces it with a freedom and a force that it does the heart good to recognise. The little pamphlet, which is published by Ponsonby, of Graf- ton Street, Dublin, will do more to reinforce the Pope's con- demnation than all the eloquence which the whole Unionist Press can produce, for this is impartial evidence given by an enthusiastic Irish Nationalist who, nevertheless, rates honour above party.
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