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Is Ulster Right

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domination of a political priesthood; others dread still more the union of the Church with anarchism. As has already been shown, they refuse to join the United Irish League; some in the north have actually subscribed the Ulster Covenant; many others have signed petitions against Home Rule throughout the country; and a still larger number have stated that they would gladly do so if they did not fear the consequences. It is probably therefore correct to say that the number of Unionists in Ireland decidedly exceeds the number of Protestants; in other words, less than three-fourths of the population are Nationalists, and more than one-fourth (perhaps about one-third) are Unionists. And more than that; if we are to test the reality of a movement, we must look not merely at numbers but at other matters. Violent language may be used; but the fact remains as I have previously stated that even if the Nationalists are taken as being only two-thirds of the population, their annual subscriptions to the cause do not amount to anything like a penny per head and that the agitation could not last for six months if it were not kept alive by contributions from America and the Colonies. But though the Nationalist movement has not brought about a Union between the Orange and the Green, it has caused two other Unions to be formed which will have an important influence on the future history of the country. In the first place it has revived, or cemented, the Union which, as we have seen, existed at former periods of Irish history, but which has existed in no other country in the world--the Union between the Black and the Red. That a Union between two forces so essentially antagonistic as Ultramontanism and Jacobinism will be permanent, one can hardly suppose; whether the clericals, if they succeed in crushing the heretics, will afterwards be able to turn and crush the anarchists with whom they have been in alliance, and then reign supreme; or whether, as happened in France at the end of the eighteenth century and in Portugal recently, the anarchists who have grown up within the bosom of the Church will prove to be a more deadly foe to the clericals than the heretics ever were--it is impossible to say; but neither prospect seems very cheerful. In the second place, the Nationalist movement has drawn all the Protestant bodies together as nothing else could. Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists have all joined hands in the defence of their common liberties. The Nationalists have left no stone unturned in their efforts to prove that the northern Protestants are disloyal. They have succeeded in finding one speech that was made by an excited orator (not a leader) forty-four years ago, to the effect that the Disestablishment of the Church might result in the Queen's Crown being kicked into the Boyne. As this is the only instance they can rake up, it has been quoted in the House of Commons and elsewhere again and again; and Mr. Birrell (whose knowledge of Ireland seems to be entirely derived from Nationalist speeches) has recently elaborated it by saying that when the Church was going to be disestablished "they used to declare" that the Queen's Crown would be kicked into the Boyne, and yet their threats came to nothing and therefore the result of Home Rule will be the same. The fact was that the Church establishment was the last relic of Protestant Ascendancy; and as I have already shown, that meant Anglican ascendancy in which Presbyterianism did not participate; hence, when the agitation for Disestablishment arose, though some few Presbyterians greatly disliked it, their opposition as a whole was lukewarm. But when in 1886 Home Rule became a question of practical politics, they rose up against it as one man; in 1893, when the second Home Rule Bill was introduced and actually passed the House of Commons, they commenced organising their Volunteer army to resist it, if necessary, by force of arms; and they are just as keen to-day as they were twenty years ago. They are certainly not disloyal; the republican spirit which permeated their ancestors in the eighteenth century has long since died out completely. Sir Walter Scott said that if he had lived at the time of

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