those who know the temper and fighting qualities of the working-men opponents of Home Rule in the North are under no illusion as to the account they would give of themselves if called upon to defend the cause of Protestantism, liberty, and imperial unity as they understand it.  Let us, however, dismiss this alternative and give Nationalists credit for the desire to persuade the industrial North to come in by showing it that it will be to its advantage to join cordially in the building up of a united Ireland under a separate legislature.

The difficulties in the way of producing this conviction are very obvious.  The North has prospered under the Act of Union—­why should it be ready to enter upon a new ‘variety of untried being’?  What that state of being will be like, it naturally gauges from the forces which are working for Home Rule at present.  Looking at these simply from the industrial standpoint and leaving out of account all the powerful elements of religious and race prejudice, the man of the North sees two salient facts which have dominated all the political activity of the Nationalist campaign.  One is a voluble and aggressive disloyalty, not merely to ‘England’ and to the present system of government, but to the Crown which represents the unity of the three kingdoms, and the other is the introduction of politics into business in the very virulent and destructive form known as boycotting.

Now, hostility to the Crown, if it means anything, means a struggle for separation as soon as Home Rule has given to the Irish people the power to organise and arm.  And (still keeping to the sternly practical point of view) that would, for the time being at least, spell absolute ruin to the industrial North.  The practice of boycotting, again, is the very antithesis of industry—­it creates an atmosphere in which industry and enterprise simply cannot live.  The North has seen this practice condoned as a desperate remedy for a desperate ill, but it has seen it continued long after the ill had passed away, used as a weapon by one Nationalist section against another, and revived when anything like a really oppressive or arbitrary eviction had become impossible.  There seems to have been in Nationalist circles, since the time of O’Connell, but little appreciation of the deadly character of this social curse; and the prospect of a Government which would tolerate it naturally fills the mind of the Northern commercial man with alarm and aversion.

Again, the democratisation of local government which gave the Nationalist leaders a unique opportunity of showing the value, has but served to demonstrate the ineffectiveness, of their political tactics.  North of Ireland opinion was deeply interested in this reform, and appreciated its far-reaching importance.  Elsewhere, I think it will be safe to say, people generally were indifferent to it until it came, and the leaders seemed to see in it only a weapon to be used for political purposes.  To the great vista