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 was well or ill founded.

But, while the opinion that a Dublin Parliament meant separation was shared by many who had little else in common with the Ulster Protestants, the latter stood alone in the intensity of their conviction that “Home Rule meant Rome Rule.”  It has already been mentioned that it is the “disloyalty” attributed rightly or wrongly to the Roman Catholics as a body that has been, in recent times at all events, the mainspring of Protestant distrust.  But sectarian feeling, everywhere common between rival creeds, is, of course, by no means absent.  Englishmen find it hard to understand what seems to them the bigoted and senseless animosity of the rival faiths in Ireland.  This is due to the astonishing shortness of their memory in regard to their own history, and their very limited outlook on the world outside their own island.  If, without looking further back in their history, they reflected that the “No Popery” feeling in England in mid-Victorian days was scarcely less intense than it is in Ulster to-day; or if they realised the extent to which Gambetta’s “Le clericalisme, voila l’ennemi” continues still to influence public life in France, they might be less ready to