“Loyalty” to the Crown is a false issue.  Disloyalty to the Crown is a negligible factor in all parts of Ireland.  Loyalty or disloyalty to a certain political system is the real matter at issue.  At the present day the really serious objections to Home Rule on the part of the leading Ulster Unionists seem to be economic.  They have built up thriving trades under the Union.  They have the closest business connections with Great Britain, and a mutual fabric of credit.  They cherish sincere and profound apprehensions that their business prosperity will suffer by any change in the form of government.  To scoff at these apprehensions is absurd and impolitic in the last degree.  But to reason against them is also an almost fruitless labour.  Those who feel them vaguely picture an Irish Parliament composed of Home Rulers and Unionists, in the same proportion to population as at present, and divided by the same bitter and demoralizing feuds.  But there will be no Home Rulers after Home Rule, that is to say, if the Home Rule conceded is sufficient.  I believe that Ulster Unionists do not realize either the beneficent transformation which will follow a change from sentimental to practical politics in Ireland, as it has followed a similar change in every other country in the Empire, or the enormous weight which their own fine qualities and strong economic position will give them in the settlement of Irish questions.

Nor do they realize, I venture to think, that any Irish Government, however composed, will be a patriotic Government pledged and compelled for its own credit and safety to do its best for the interests of Ireland.  I have never met an Irishman who was not proud of the northern industries, and it is obvious that the industrial prosperity of the north is vital to the fiscal and general interests of Ireland, just as the far more wealthy mining interests of the Rand are vital to the stability and prosperity of the Transvaal, and were regarded as such and treated as such by the farmer majority of the Transvaal after the grant of Home Rule.  Those interests have prospered amazingly since, and in that country, be it remembered, volunteer British corps raised on the Rand had been the toughest of all the British foes which the peasant commandos had to meet in a war ended only four years before.

If the fears of Ulster took any concrete form, it would be easier to combat them; but they are unformulated, nebulous.  Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine what measure of oppression could possibly be invented by the most malignant Irish Government which would not recoil like a boomerang upon those in whose supposed interests it was framed.  I shall have to deal with this point again in discussing taxation, and need here only remind the reader that Ulster is not a Province, any part of which could possibly be injured by any form of taxation which did not hit other Provinces equally.