HOME-RULE AND NATIONAL SECURITY.
[TO TIM EDITOR Of TRY Sr iCTATOR..1 SIR,—In your last issue Mr. J. Ulic Burke asks me whether it is not " the fact that Home-rule, by giving the people of Ireland some stake in the Empire and by wiping out the bitter memories of the Irish overseas, would make for stability and for strength? " I answer that this is not a "fact," but a statement of what those who think with Mr. Burke hope and believe would result. How if the belief proved ill-founded and the hope were disappointed? National safety ought not to be staked on the accuracy of political predictions. No one, so far as I know, denies that under Home-rule the Irish leaders and their supporters in America would have in their hands incalculably greater power to injure us than they hold to-day, and it is with them, not with us, that the decision would lie how that power was to be used. What is this but to allow the safety of the Empire to pass out of our own keeping into the hands of others P—I am,
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