This was an end that could not by any juggling be reconciled with the Ulsterman’s notion of “loyalty.”  Moreover, whatever knowledge he possessed of his country’s history—­and he knows a good deal more, man for man, than the Englishman—­confirmed his deep distrust of those whom, following the example of John Bright, he always bluntly described as “the rebel party.”  He knew something of the rebellions in Ireland in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and was under no illusion as to the design for which arms had been taken up in the past.  He knew that that design had not changed with the passing of generations, although gentler methods of accomplishing it might sometimes find favour.  Indeed, one Nationalist leader himself took pains, at a comparatively recent date, to remove any excuse there may ever have been for doubt on this point.  Mr. John Redmond was an orator who selected his words with care, and his appeals to historical analogies were not made haphazard.  When he declared (in a speech in 1901) that, “in its essence, the national movement to-day is the same as it was in the days of Hugh O’Neill, of Owen Roe, of Emmet, or of Wolfe Tone,” those names, which would have had but a shadowy significance for a popular audience in England, carried very definite meaning to the ears of Irishmen, whether Nationalist or Unionist.  Mr. Gladstone, in the fervour of his conversion to Home Rule, was fond of allusions to the work of Molyneux and Swift, Flood and Grattan; but these were men whose Irish patriotism never betrayed them into disloyalty to the British Crown or hostility to the British connection.  They were reformers, not rebels.  But it was not with the political ideals of such men that Mr. Redmond claimed his own to be identical, nor even with that of O’Connell, the apostle of repeal of the Union, but with the aims of men who, animated solely by hatred of England, sought to establish the complete independence of Ireland by force of arms, and in some cases by calling in (like Roger Casement in our own day) the aid of England’s foreign enemies.

In the face of appeals like this to the historic imagination of an impressionable people, it is not surprising that by neither Mr. Redmond’s followers nor by his opponents was much account taken of his own personal disapproval of extremes both of means and ends.  His opponents in Ulster simply accepted such utterances as confirmation of what they had known all along from other sources to be the actual facts, namely, that the Home Rule agitation was “in its essence” a separatist movement; that its adherents were, as Mr. Redmond himself said on another occasion, “as much rebels as their fathers were in 1798”; and that the men of Ulster were, together with some scattered sympathisers in the other Provinces, the depositaries of the “loyal” tradition.

The latter could boast of a pedigree as long as that of the rebels.  If Mr. Redmond’s followers were to trace their political ancestry, as he told them, to the great Earl of Tyrone who essayed to overthrow England with the help of the Spaniard and the Pope, the Ulster Protestants could claim descent from the men of the Plantation, through generation after generation of loyalists who had kept the British flag flying in Ireland in times of stress and danger, when Mr. Redmond’s historical heroes were making England’s difficulty Ireland’s opportunity.