were, together with some scattered sympathisers
in the other Provinces, the depositaries of the "loyal" tradition.

The latter could boast of a pedigree as long as that of the rebels. If
Mr. Redmond's followers were to trace their political ancestry, as he
told them, to the great Earl of Tyrone who essayed to overthrow England
with the help of the Spaniard and the Pope, the Ulster Protestants could
claim descent from the men of the Plantation, through generation after
generation of loyalists who had kept the British flag flying in Ireland
in times of stress and danger, when Mr. Redmond's historical heroes were
making England's difficulty Ireland's opportunity.

There have been, and are, many individual Nationalists, no doubt,
especially among the more educated and thoughtful, to whom it would be
unjust to impute bad faith when they professed that their political
aspirations for Ireland were really limited to obtaining local control
of local affairs, and who resented being called "Separatists," since
their desire was not for separation from Great Britain but for the
"union of hearts," which they believed would grow out of extended
self-government. But the answer of Irish Unionists, especially in
Ulster, has always been that, whatever such "moderate," or
"constitutional" Nationalists might dream, it would be found in
practice, if the experiment were made, that no halting-place could be
found between legislative union and complete separation. Moreover, the
same view was held by men as far as possible removed from the standpoint
of the Ulster Protestant. Cardinal Manning, for example, although an
intimate personal friend of Gladstone, in a letter to Leo XIII, wrote:
"As for myself, Holy Father, allow me to say that I consider a
Parliament in Dublin and a separation to be equivalent to the same
thing. Ireland is not a Colony like Canada, but it is an integral and
vital part of one country."[1]

It is improbable that identical lines of reasoning led the Roman
Catholic Cardinal and the Belfast Orangeman and Presbyterian to this
identical conclusion; but a position reached by convergent paths from
such distant points of departure is defensible presumably on grounds
more solid than prejudice or passion. It is unnecessary here to examine
those grounds at length, for the present purpose is not to argue the
Ulster case, but to let the reader know what was, as a matter of fact,
the Ulster point of view, whether that point of view