THE INVASION OF ULSTER.
S Ulster converted, or likely to be converted, to Nation- alism I The Parnellite invasion of Tyrone and the adjoining counties ought to supply the answer to this, the most
important, and perhaps the most difficult, of the problems which obscure the future of Irish politics. Notwithstanding that it includes the poor and sparsely-peopled county of Donegal, Ulster contains a third of the population, and pro- bably at least the same proportion of the wealth of Ireland. Unless, therefore, Ulster can be won, Mr. Parnell is very well aware that the Nationalist movement will be national only in name. A mere numerical majority, recruited, as his an- tagonists can plausibly assert, from the poverty and ignorance of the more backward Provinces, is altogether insufficient for his purpose. The demand for a repeal of the Union, whether it aims at the substitution of a Federal tie, or at the creation of an independent State, will neither impress the imagination nor convince the judgment of onlookers, until it can be clearly shown that Ireland is substantially at one in making it. The severance of Ulster from the rest of Ireland is a geographical, and, therefore, a political impossibility ; and if the English people were as eager as they are reluctant to abandon the sister-country to a Native Parliament, the opposition of Ulster would be an insuperable moral obstacle to the accomplish- ment of their wish. We are not going to create a new Hungary, which will reproduce the Croatian difficulty on a larger scale, and with all the additional risks of bitterness in- volved in the chronic disaffection of the wealthiest, most in- telligent, and most progressive Province in the country. All this we may take it that Mr. Parnell, the coolest and shrewdest of Irish agitators, knows as well as any of his critics ; he is determined accordingly, at all costs, to overcome the recalcitrance of Ulster ; and he is not likely to underrate the magnitude of the task which he has set himself. Out of the twenty-nine Members returned by Ulster to Parliament, no less than twenty-seven were, at the commencement of the present year, declared opponents of Home-rule. At the general election of 1880, the small border county of Cavan, which has long enjoyed the privilege of being represented by Mr. Biggar, was the only place in the Province in which the Nationalists effected a lodgment. In 1881, they made a determined but futile attack upon Tyrone. Last year they renewed the attempt in Londonderry, and were again signally defeated. The return of Mr. Healy for Monaghan encouraged them to fresh efforts. Ulster was marked out as the chief battle-ground of the autumn campaign, and this week opera- tions have been formally commenced by the invasion of Tyrone.
The data for forming a correct opinion as to the probable results of Mr. Parnell's latest move are singularly meagre. If we were to judge exclusively by the general election of 1880, and the bye-elections of the two following years, we should predict with confidence a disastrous rebuff. If we were to judge exclusively by Mr. Healy's easy victory in Monaghan last spring, we should be led to an exactly opposite forecast. But the truth is that none of these events throw much light upon the issue of the new campaign. The agrarian agitation and the proceedings of the Irish Party during the four Sessions of the present Parliament have beep factors of such importance in the formation of Irish opinion, that they upset all reckonings which date back to the contest of 1880. The victory of Mr. Dickson, one of the apostles of tenant-right, in Tyrone, and that of Mr. Porter in Londonderry, which must in any case be one of the last counties to abandon the Union, may be explained by local and personal causes, and in neitherinstance was the Nationalist issue brought into prominence. Still less significance attaches to Mr. Healy's triumph, which was little more than the grateful tribute of the farmers of Monaghan to the author of the celebrated Healy Clause. In the absence of posi- tive evidence one way or the other, we are left to conjecture, and we must endeavour, therefore, to imagine the kind of considerations which are likely to influence the mind of a average Ulster elector at the present moment in favour of the establishment of a Native Parliament. " The English," he might reflect, " have held our country for seven centuries ; for more than three out of the seven they have been actively meddling with her affairs ; during the last fifty years they have been honestly trying to govern her well. And what is the result ? Wherever the eye turns, it. is confronted with the evidence of failure. It sees natural resources undeveloped, local business mismanaged by a privileged class, public spirit extinguished, and individual initiative stifled, under the weight of an artificial system which forbids us to give effect in our own way to our own ideas of civic and national life. Over' three-fourths of the country rebellion is only prevented by force or the fear of force, and even those of us who are loyal are normally subjected to irritating espionnage and semi-despotic laws; They Imperial Parliament is so iar away, and so busy with other matters, that we can only attract its notice by noisy and demoralising agitation, and as soon as it has satisfied us for the moment, it turns aside to more engross- ing duties, and banishes all thought of us and our concerns. Even when we have wrung from it some valuable concession, the boon is frittered away by the grudging and unsympathetic spirit in which it is administered. We know by the admis- sions of the Duke of Argyll and Mr. Chamberlain, that but for the Land League the Land Act would never have been carried, or even conceived. The real authors of the Land Act are Mr. Parnell and Mr. Healy ; the one made it possible, the other rendered it effective. The Irish Parlia- mentary party have, for the first time, compelled England to give continuous attention to Irish grievances, and the useful Irish legislation of the last three Sessions is all due to them, and would in an Irish Parliament have been trebled in quantity. England means well, but she does not and cannot understand us ; and if she could, she has not time to spare for our affairs. The old Irish Parliament was not a great success ; the new one may be a failure. But it can hardly be a greater failure than the system which it re- places. If there is any truth in the doctrines of democracy, the presumptions are all in its favour ; and if it turns out to be unworkable or incompetent—if the dream that we are fit to make our own laws and guide our own destiny proves to be an illusion—it is at any rate an illusion which we had a right to test ; and when we are disenchanted, we shall be ready with a good grace to submit our necks again to the yoke."
It is in the persuasive force of arguments like these, and not in the unintelligent hatred for England to which the Parnellite orators habitually appeal, and which in many of them is beyond doubt a genuine and consuming passion, that the real strength of the Nationalist cause in Ulster will be found. And if they are to be forced to a choice between Home-rule and the continuance of the existing system of discredited and irritating centralisation, the English confidence in the traditional loyalty of Ulstermen may before long be rudely disappointed.
But we see little reason to fear serious results from the cam- paign which has just begun. There is abundant evidence that Ulster has not succumbed to the moral paralysis which has crept over the rest of Ireland during the last three years, and so long as the equivocal relations of Mr. Parnell and his
colleagues with the outrage-mongers of the Land League remain unexplained, he has little chance of obtaining a foot- hold in the Northern Province. Nor are his chief lieutenants, able and eloquent though several of them are, fitted either by nature or by training for the propaganda which they have now taken in hand. The blind hostility to England which lies at the root of their faith, the reckless vituperation of English states- men which forms the staple of their rhetoric, the conventional hysterics in which they express their devotion to down- trodden Ireland, will find no echo in an ordinary Ulster audi- ence. The simple truth is that in Ulster England is not hated, and that, once given control over their own local busi- ness, the vast majority of Ulstermen would recognise that they have far more to lose than to gain by the substitution of an Irish for an Imperial Parliament. In any possible revival of the Native Legislature, the voice of Ulster, the most separate and, at the same time, the richest and most intelligent of the Four Provinces, would habitually be overborne by the combined votes of the other three. The stronghold of Irish Protestant- ism, she would lie at the mercy of an Ultramontane majority. The one corner of the country in which manufactures flourish, she would be taxed in support of fantastic schemes for the introduction of impossible industries, and (in an independent Ireland) would see her wealth slowly dwindle away under a Protective tariff. What inducement is there for Ulster to relinquish the prerogative place which she has for centuries held as the British outpost in Ireland, and voluntarily to subject herself to neighbours whose interests and sympathies are so widely different from her own I Why should she abandon her right to a direct voice in the affairs of a whole kingdom, and to a distinctive place in the most ancient and famous of Parliaments, in order to furnish a despised minority to an obscure provincial Diet? The very same senti- ment which gives so much of its seeming strength to the general Irish demand for Home-rule—the desire for a separate and conspicuous position in the world—in Ulster makes alto- gether for the maintenance of the Union. The Union is safe so long as Ulster is loyal, and the loyalty of Ulster is in far greater danger from the short-sighted indifference of English statesmanship, than from the most strenuous efforts of the Parnellite propaganda.
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