• A CHANGING IRELAND
To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—May I join issue with Mr. W. M. Crook over that portion of his article, "A Changing Ireland," which deals with the
North ? There, he states, the Government has become almost a despotism and he deplores the absence of a regular opposition. May I remind him that members of the Northern
Ireland parliament are elected in the same manner as in Britain, and, this being so, the absence of an opposition may surely be interpreted as an expression of the wishes of the people ? I fear, however, that Mr. Crook, like many Englishmen1 has allowed his common sense to be overridden by the volubility
with which the minority in Ulster voice their grievances, backed up by the subtle propaganda of the Dublin demagogues, who naturally cast envious eyes upon the wealth and prosperity of the industrial North.
It is, however, in respect of his views concerning the prospect of Irish unity that the superficiality of Mr. Crook's knowledge of conditions in Ireland is fully exposed. The union of North and South does not simply mean the joining together of two adjacent territories : it means the fusion of two distinct races which have no more in common with each other than the air they breathe. Economically as well as politically they are poles apart, and the descendants of the sturdy Covenanting stock who colonised Ulster and built up a wealthy and industrious province naturally view with alarm and repugnance any suggestion that they should jeopardise the future of their heritage by union with the disloyal and disruptive elements who hold sway in the South.
Kipling in x912 wrote in defence of Ulster :
"We asked no more than leave To reap where we had sown Through good and ill to cleave To our own flag and throne."
These words still express the sentiments of the North today ; and so, I venture to say, does the famous utterance of Lord
Randolph Churchill in 1886, when on the question of the Rome Rule Bill he said "Ulster will fight, Ulster will be
Midhurst, Sussex.
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