LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE RIGHT OF REBELLION,
[To THI EDITOR OF 711a " SPECTATOR:] Si,—Mr. Robert Lynd will forgive me if I suggest that he is a rather careless controversialist. I did not (1) say that the people of the rest of Ireland are the bitter and hereditary opponents of the people of Ulster. What I said was that North-East Ulster would, under Home Rule, be governed by a class of men who are her bitter and hereditary opponents. Does Mr. Lyncl deny that a bitter feud has existed for genera- tions between the Plantation people and the Catholics who, if the Bill passes, will be their masters P As the argumentative value of your correspondent's little historical retrospect is mainly based on the above misquotation I need not examine the conclusions he draws therefrom. The real fact of the matter is that, as was recently pointed oat by the Times' correspondent, the word " Ulster " has nowadays a political rather than a geOgraphical connotation. When people in discussing Home Rule talk of Ulster they mean (as a sentence in Mr. Lynd's letter indicates) the Protestant community of the North-East. Mr. Lynd, like many other controversialists on the Nationalist side, makes play with the word in its double sense.
I did not (2) say in my previous letter that "the Union" has not availed to blight Ulster's prosperity or to arrest her development ; but, if only to put Mr. Lynd right, I will say it now. Compared with the rest of Ireland the development of industrial Ulster appears to me little short of amazing; and we cannot wonder that she strongly resents the attempt to place her under the yoke of her less successful competitors. Emigration statistics, as you showed in your notes last week, are no sure test of prosperity or the reverse. Men and women have "fled in their thousands" from the shores of England and Scotland during the last fifty years, yet both countries remain highly flourishing. Mr. Lynd's picture of a Home Rule Belfast as great and prosperous as Manchester is a daring flight of fancy, but I know of nothing that lends it credibility. The facts, as well as the opinions of those best qualified to speak on the subject—the men who have created Ulster's prosperity—are all against his view. Before the Act of Union Ireland was in so deplorable a condition that the Catholics themselves agitated, much to the "patriots" disgust, in favour of the two countries being made one. After the Act was passed trade and population statistics point to a decided and fairly continuous improvement up to the disastrous time of the great potato famine ; and North- East Ulster's progress, in particular, has been infinitely greater and more rapid since the Union than ever it was before. She owes her splendid position to-day to the genius and industry of her inhabitants ; but I venture to say, pace
Lynd, that she would not be what she now is without the protection of British law. The Home Rule Bill spells for her the loss of that protection, as well as of her present status in the United Kingdom ; and I submit once more that the able leading men of the northern province are better judges of what that means to them than their irresponsible outside advisers. To try to force our friends the Protestant loyalists of Ireland out of the shelter afforded by British rule, which through good and ill they have courageously supported, and to place them under disloyal and probably incompetent Molly Maguire domination, which with their whole hearts they abhor, would be, in my opinion, an act of political baseness and gross ingratitude ; and if ever Ulster should decide to resist by armed force such a scheme of betrayal all true friends of freedom will be found on her side.—I am, Sir, &e.,
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