t 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 roo