Professor Goudy, the Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford,
has a remarkable letter on the Home Rule Bill in Tuesday's Times. Writing as a lifelong Liberal, with hereditary and personal sympathies with Nationalist aspira- tion, but also as an Ulsterman, Professor Goudy protests against the forcing of the Bill through the present Parliament as inconsistent with sound Liberal policy. The question, he maintains, was not made a test or even a primary question for Liberal candidates at the last two elections, and ought to be submitted to the electors afresh as the test issue of a general election. "To create a new Constitution for a country in dis- regard of the strenuous opposition of a large and homogeneous portion tion of its inhabitants seems to me a strange step for Liberal statesmen to take." The argument that because perhaps two- thirds of the inhabitants of Ireland are in favour of Home Rule it should therefore be granted on democratic principles he cannot admit to be sound. "Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom, and it is only when a clear majority of the electors of the United Kingdom have pronounced in favour of the constitutional change, when submitted to them as a primary issue, that the principles of democratic government will justify it."
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