Ulster’s opposition to Home Rule is no unreasoning hate.  It proceeds not from the few; it is not the outcome of political prejudice; it is the hostility of a progressive and advancing people who have made their portion of their country prosperous and decline to hand it over to the control of representatives from the most backward and unprogressive counties.

They are actuated by love of their country.  They yield to no one in their patriotism and their desire for Ireland’s welfare.  They have always given their support to movements which have had for their objects the improvement of Irish conditions and the increase of Irish well-being.  Their sympathies are with Irish social reform—­and the sympathies of many of them with social reform of an advanced character.  Contrast their attitude with that of the Irish Nationalist Party in respect of reforms which have proceeded from the Imperial Parliament and movements within Ireland herself.

Take the Irish Land Act of 1903, accepted by both political parties in Great Britain as affording the real solution of the Irish agrarian problem.  What has been the Irish Nationalist attitude?  Praise for it on platforms in the United States when it was essential to reach the pockets of subscribers by recounting a record of results gained from the expenditure of American donations; but in Ireland itself opposition to its effective working.  Read Nationalist speeches and there is always running through them the fear that the Act by solving the land question would remove the real motive power which made Home Rule a living issue.  Hence the interference to prevent landlords and tenants coming to an agreement over sales without outside assistance.  So to-day Irish Nationalists are still endeavouring to keep alive the old bad feeling between landlord and tenant which they so successfully created in the seventies and eighties.  What better proof of this deliberate attempt to prevent the success of a great reform is to be found than the frank utterance of Mr. John Dillon at Swinford.[65] “It has been said,” he declared, “that we have obstructed the smooth working of the Act.  I wish to heaven we had the power to obstruct the smooth working of the Act more than we did.  It has worked too smoothly—­far too smoothly to my mind....  Some men have complained with the past year that the Land Act was not working fast enough.  For my part I look upon it as working a great deal too fast, and at a pace which has been ruinous to the people.”  What have the Ulster people done which can compare with this opposition to a measure that has admittedly effected a beneficial revolution in Irish agrarian life?  Yet Mr. John Dillon is acclaimed as a true Irish patriot and we are denounced as the enemies of our country!