thern province--

1. _Home Rule, in the judgment of Ulster, would degrade the status of
Ulster citizenship by impairing its relationship to Imperial
Parliament._ This would be effected both by lessening or extinguishing
the representation of Ulster in that Parliament, and by removing the
control of Ulster rights and liberties from Imperial Parliament and
entrusting it to a hostile Parliament in Dublin. Ulstermen would thus
stand on a dangerously lower plane of civil privilege than their
fellow-citizens in Great Britain. To place them in this undeserved
inferiority, they hold to be unjust and cruel.

2. _Home Rule would gravely imperil our civil and religious liberties._
Ireland is pre-eminently a clerically controlled country, the number of
Roman Catholic priests being per head greater than that of any country
in Europe. Her staff of members of religious orders, male and female, is
also enormous, their numbers having increased during the last fifty
years 150 per cent., while the population has decreased 30 per cent. It
is undeniable, therefore, that in a Dublin Parliament, the overwhelming
majority of whose members would be adherents of the Roman Catholic
faith, the Roman ecclesiastical authority, which claims the right to
decide as to what questions come within the region of faith and morals
would be supreme. Great stress has lately been laid in Nationalist
speeches from British platforms on the tolerant spirit towards
Protestants which animates Irish Roman Catholics. We gladly acknowledge
that in most parts of Ireland Protestants and Roman Catholics, as
regards the ordinary affairs of life, live side by side on friendly
neighbourly terms. Indeed, that spirit, as a consequence of the growing
prosperity of Ireland, had been steadily increasing, till the recent
revival of the Home Rule proposal, with its attendant fears of
hierarchical ascendency, as illustrated by the promulgation of the _Ne
Temere_ decree, suddenly interrupted it. But the fundamental fact of the
case is, that in the last resort, it is not with their Roman Catholic
neighbours, or even with their hierarchy, that Irish Protestants have to
reckon; it is rather with the Vatican, the inexorable power behind them
all, whose decrees necessarily over-ride all the good-will which
neighbourly feeling might inspire in the Roman Catholic mind. The _Ne
Temere_ decree affords a significant premonition of the spirit which
would direct Home Rule legislation. It is not