Another Convert to Home Rule

New Zealand Tablet, 18 April 1912, Page 19

Another Convert to Home Rule

The Ulster party has made a distinguished convert. , < A few months ago Sir" Arthur Conan Doyle, on being written to by •an "Irish Unionist newspaper, which wanted his views against Home Rule, wrote back to the effect that he - was sorry, * but he had - turned \ Home Ruler. y . To-day another \ very \i distinguished man;- a great lawyer, and one of the most delightful English writers of the time—Sir Frederick Pollock—-informs the Westminster Gazette that he, too," has turned a Home Ruler. It is Ulster that has converted him. A Twentyfive years ago,' he says, ' I was a convinced Unionist, hoping that the Ulster Unionists were abandoning their ideas of ascendency, and would work with British statesmen for '§ the f improvement of Irish -Government under the Union,, an end which I;. believed and still believe was then practical with good will and good sense. What has that party done? It has not stirred a finger for the amendment of notoriously absurd methods of administration. It, has wrecked Mr. Balfour's scheme of University settlement. It has played into . the -hands of ■ the extreme Nationalists -in wrecking a ..moderate scheme of devolution,'; which commanded the assent of many Unionists in Ireland as well as in Great Britain, not to speak of its part in frustrating the endeavours of its more generous and -far-seeing: British allies in the conference of 1910. " It has obstructed ag"icultural ' development. *lt has made Lord Duriraven, : a leading Irish Protestant Conservative, a Home Ruler. I am reluctantly convinced that .its/ideas- are still not of equality, but of ascendency; and the action of Sir E. Carson and his companions at Belfast would have completed the conviction if more proof had been wanting. That is why lam now a Home Ruler.'