Mr. Birrell said recently at Bristol that Ulster would be right to fight if it were oppressed in its religion or despoiled of its property.  We welcome his conversion.  When he pleads for Ulster to wait until it is plain that oppression has come, we recall to mind the phrase so often on Liberal lips, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” and we say that we should be false to ourselves and to our trust if we were unprepared for what the future will bring under Home Rule.

For our opposition to Home Rule we are condemned by the Irish Nationalists as the enemies of our country.  We believe ourselves to be its best friends.  We believe Home Rule to be the greatest obstacle to Irish progress and prosperity.  Irish Nationalists have made Home Rule their only idol and denounce every one who will not worship at its shrine.  Every reform, unless they thought that it tended to advance Home Rule or magnify their powers, has received their hostility, sometimes open and avowed, at other times secret and working through devious ways.

No one who reads the history of Ulster can doubt that its inhabitants have not as much love of Ireland and as much wish to see her prosperous as the Nationalists.  They indeed attribute all Irish shortcomings to the Union.  Ulstermen, bearing in mind their own progress since the Union, not unnaturally decline to accept so absurd an argument.  The Union has been no obstacle to their development:  why should it have been the barrier to the rest of Ireland?  Ulstermen believe that the Union with Great Britain has assisted the development of their commerce and industry.  They are proud of the progress of Belfast and of her position in the industrial and shipping world.  Without great natural advantages it has been built up by energy, application, clearheadedness and hard work.  The opposition to Home Rule is the revolt of a business and industrial community against the domination of men who have shown no aptitude for either.  The United Irish League, the official organization of the Home Rule Party, is, as a Treasurer once confessed, remarkably lacking in the support of business men, merchants, manufacturers, leaders of industry, bankers, and men who compose a successful and progressive community.[64] In the management of their party funds, their impending bankruptcy but a few years ago, the mad scheme of New Tipperary, and the fiasco of the Parnell Migration Company there is the same monotonous story of failure.  Can surprise be felt that Ulstermen refuse to place the control of national affairs in the hands of those who have shown little capacity in the direction of their own personal concerns.  What responsible statesman would suggest that the City of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, or any advancing industrial and commercial centre in Great Britain should be ruled and governed and taxed, without the hope of effective intervention, by a party led by Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Lansbury?  Yet Home Rule means much like that for Ulstermen, and the impossibility of the scheme is emphasized in the example of Ireland by religious differences which have their roots in Irish history.