WILL ULSTER FIGHT?

Otago Witness, Issue 2978, 12 April 1911, Page 90

WILL ULSTER FIGHT?

ANOTHER OMINOUS STATEMENT. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, February 17. If The Times had not a habit of publishing, as "by a correspondent," statements to which it itself gives considerable weight, we might afford to overlook the letter which appears this week, and to abide by 'the assurance of the Daily Mail that there is nothing to be feared in the way of anti-Home Rule violence in the North of Ireland. The correspondent gees into the subject at length, and towards the end becomes unusually warm in his assertion that the temper of the Protestant North is as resolute and irreconcilable as in 18:6 and 1893. "They are organising now," he writes, " as they organised at the time when Lord Randolph Churchill declared that ' Ulster would fight and Ulster would be right.' The Unionist c'ubs, which numbered 170,000 in 1893, are taing rapidly, though quietly, revived. ' They are stated to be organised on thoroughly democratic lines, and Lo ha\e plenty of money at their command, "and their funds do not come from the pocke.s of the foreign enemies oi England." Whether they have done more than merely organise the correspondent is unable to judge. Though it is said that arms and ammunition are b„ing purchased and drilling entered upon, "my belief is that if anything of the kind hifl been yet attempted it hes been attempted on a very insignificant scale, and witnout the knowledge or consent of the acknowledged chiefs of the Unionist party." There is one thing which the writer does not hesitate to assert—namely, that "should Home Rule in any shape ultimately be imposed upon them two results would assuredly follow. The loyalty of the Ulster Protestants to England and to the British connection would fall dead, never to be revived i and every act of the executive in College Green for which Mr* Redmond calls would be met with the concerted resistance oi the mest dogged population in the British Islands." The Ulsterman, he says, would resort to a notax movement, which would be mere general than ever was the no-rent movement of the Nationalists. The slightest incident would almost certainly lead to riots in Belfast itself, and at any of half a dozen othetr points where the Catholic and the- Protestant masses axe in clcse contact; and these riots between fanatical populations filled with mutual suspicion and fear would but too surely exceed in ferocity and in duration the formidable disturbance of 1885. Nothing could fasten upon the neck of Protestant Ulster the yoke of a Home Rule Parliament but the most unsparing use oi physical force and adequate force for the purpose could only be found in the regular army. . . But are fljlr Asquith and his colleagues ready to place the King's troops at his (Mr Redmond's) disposal to fulfil this threat? Is he himself ready to carry it out with the indispensable aid of Brit'sh bayonets. Could the Nonconformist political conscience in Great Britain tolerate the forcible subjugation of the Irish Protestants to the unchecked sway of the Roman Catholic majority? Were Protestant Ulster indeed overborne and the heart's desire of generations cf Irish rebels at last gratified by the aid of British troops shooting down under the Union Jack the descendants of the men who held Derry for England and for the cause of civil and religious liberty, England would have bought off, without satisfying, the seditious. South by the creation of a permanently seditious North. . . The disaffected North would be not less troublesome but it would also be a chironic source of national danger. The 'implacable hate' of the Nationalists for England would prove to be a very mild and innccuous dislike compared with the sullen enmity which Protestant Ulster would long harbour towards the once-trusted friends who had betrayed her into the hands of her most bitter fcics."