satisfaction of their fellowworkers that not even police protection could always prevent their being broken up. But with peace things altered to this extent, that the majority of the men in the shipyards and engineering shops were made discontented with their hours and wages, and before long some forty thousand of them came out on strike. And when the strike died out some discontent survived. This led to the formation of a political labour party, which, with the aid of the Nationalists, has since made itself felt at both the Parliamentary and the Local Government elections.

Both the strike and the formation of this labour party were hailed by the English Liberal and Labour press with delight. The favourite contention of those papers had always been that the opposition of the Ulster Protestant populace was an artificial creation of the landlords and employers, astutely devised to prevent the small farmers and workmen of the North joining with those of the South in demanding land and labour and government reform throughout all Ireland. Now, they said, the workmen have broken loose from the control of the masters, and we shall see what we shall see. Well, they were right, and all have seen it who have eyes to see.

The fierce riots which have recently occurred in Ulster, and more especially in Belfast, were deplorable, but like many other things in themselves deplor

able, they should be, if rightly understood, useful by way of correction and reproof. If they correct the delusion of those Liberal and Labour editors, who honestly entertain it, that the hatred of Home Rule felt by the Ulster workman is a oreation of his employer, it will be good. If it opens the eyes of the English workman to the way in which he has been humbugged in the matter, it will be better. But we cannot be sure it will have either result. Few of the editors honestly believed in the delusion: they only worked it up to humbug the English working man. And the English working man does not appear to resent being humbugged by his instructors. During the negotiations which preceded the first Home Rule Bill, Mr Labouchere was the liaison officer between Mr Parnell and the Liberal leaders. Once he brought to Sir William Harcourt a new demand from the Irish chief. "Tell him I refuse," said Sir William angrily: "I will eat no more dirt." Mr Labouchere looked surprised. "Indeed," he said; "you have eaten so much lately that I thought you had got to like it." And possibly the English working man has been so much humbugged by his instructors of late that he has got to like it.

Let us now shortly consider the origin of the lamentable disturbances in Ulster, and especially in Belfast where infinitely the worst occurred. At first the Ulster Loyalist had a sneaking liking for the Sinn Feiners. All along he was con

vinced that the only thing the Irish Nationalists wanted was separation from the British Empire. When their leaders and their newspapers talked of Home Rule within the Empire he simply regarded them as lying: what they wanted was Home Rule as a step towards separation. Accordingly when the Sinn Feiners declared that their object was separation, he recognised them as in their way honest men; and, being honest men, he liked them and felt they were men with whom it was possible to deal: if they agreed to accept something less than separation they would probably keep to their agreement. But so soon as the system of murder was established his liking for the Sinn Feiners came to a sudden end; and when that system had extended to the frontier counties of Ulster fieroe dislike took its place. That dislike rose to fury when Colonel Smyth, a gallant fellow-Ulsterman, who had shown his loyalty to the Empire by facing its enemies in the field, and his loyalty to Ireland by facing her assassins behind the hedges, was murdered at Cork in broad daylight while sitting in his own club. His fury over this was further fired when he heard that the Sinn Feiners had refused to permit Colonel Smyth's body to be brought back to Ulster by train; and that it had to be conveyed by private

motor-car in order to be buried in his native place by the graves of his fathers.

In their rage the Ulster Loyalists resolved that they would work no longer side by side with avowed sympathisers with the perpetrators of such crimes. This resolution was first adopted by the workmen employed in the great shipbuilding yard of Harland & Wolff. This fact is to be noted for two reasons. It was here that the late strike of the ironworkers began, and that the new political labour party originated; and, in the second place, the head of Harland & Wolff is Lord Pirrie, the leading capitalist and employer in Ulster who is at once a Radical and Home Ruler.1 The workmen of the firm are nine-tenths of them Protestants, or, as the Westminster Gazette' in a moment of candour described them, Scotchmen, which, I suppose, means of Scottish blood; but among the remainder were some avowed and truculent Sinn Feiners. The Loyalists told these men they must leave the yard. Most of them left quietly enough, but some drew revolvers and shouted, "Up, the rebels!" and they were forcibly removed. When work was over and the Loyalists were returning home, some of them had to pass through what are now called Catholic, but what used to be called Irish,

with a man who will not sign a pledge against treason and murder?

fast.

The Liberal and Labour papers have been at some pains to explain these proceedings to the satisfaction of their readers. Some of the bolder of them stand firmly by their old theory, that they, like every other opposition to Nationalism, were the work of the capitalists and employers. I suppose it was a further development of their devilish astuteness which led them to start the thing among men employed by a Radical and Home Ruler. Others weep over them as the manifestation of that religious intolerance which is supposed to be characteristic of Ulster Protestants. This is hardly consistent with the fact that some of the men first ejected from the shipyards were not Catholics. It is still less consistent with the pledge which the Loyalists insist that all their fellow-workers must sign. That pledge makes no reference to religion. All that the pledge requires is a declaration of loyalty to the King, and of abhorrence of political murders and political strikes. What state of mind must an editor be in who declares it is a workman's natural right to refuse to work on the same job with a man who is not registered as a trade unionist, and who denounces as brutal tyranny the conduct of a Loyalist who deolines to work side by side

The fact, of course, is that the Ulster opposition to

or wrong, is essentially a working-class opposition. If, as I have before written, it had depended on the landlords and employers, it would have broken down long before this. In the South and West of Ireland there is no Protestant working-class worth mentioning.

The Protestants there are composed practically only of landlords and employers. The result is, we have them constantly calling out for a settlement, now of one kind and now of another, which the Protestants of the North will not look at. In the same way Catholic landlords and employers are very moderate in their Nationalism: it is the labourers and small farmers who are, and have always been, calling out for separation. The hopelessness of the situation in Ireland is that both in the South and the North it is the working people who dictate policy, and that the policy in each case is the offspring of their racial, religious, and traditional hatreds and affections.

And, if rationally considered, the late disturbances in Ulster will prove what a service to law and order was rendered by those who, when the third Home Rule Bill was before Parliament, organised the Ulster Volunteers. That service consisted in putting the Protestant youth of Ulster

under discipline. That youth were filled with the most passionate hatred of the Bill, which in their view was to hand them over, bound hand and foot, to the mercy of their hereditary enemies. Those enemies were openly and loudly exulting over the prospect of any opposition to their rule being put down in blood by the British army. If things had been left to themselves, this state of feeling would have resulted in sporadio outbursts of violence all over the province, to which the recent disturbances would be child's play. Something like this happened when the first Home Rule Bill was under oonsideration, although everybody was then pretty confident that it would not pass. What would have happened if Ulster opposition had been unorganised when the third Home Rule Bill did pass is too terrible to contemplate. And it was from this that the organisation of the Ulster Volunteers saved the country.

It saved it by putting the resistance to the Bill under the direction of cool-headed and responsible men. Instead of leaving tens of thousands of excited youths to act as their feelings moved them, they were brought together and placed under military discipline. That discipline forbade any of them to act on his own initiative, and it was strictly enforced. They were all pledged to resist the putting into operation of the Home Rule Act, if necessary at the cost of their lives. But how and when that resist

anoe was to be made was to be decided by their leaders, and by them alone. As a result the Home Rule Bill was discussed again and again, and finally passed; and yet not a stone was thrown by a Loyalist from one corner of Ulster to the other.

I myself was an eye-witness to how that discipline operated. I was staying in the most Scottish part of County Antrim, with a relative who is a county magistrate. At breakfast one Sunday morning my relative received a police message to come at once to a certain village, as there was likely to be trouble there. I accompanied him in his car to the village. We found that during Saturday to Sunday night a band of Nationalists had come down from their cabins in the mountains, and had broken every pane and every sash in the windows of the

Presbyterian Church. When the farmers and their families arrived for morning service, a ory went up among the young men to follow the desecraters to their homes and exterminate them. The young men all belonged, however, to the Volunteers, and several of their officers were present; and these peremptorily forbade any attempt at revenge. Their orders were implicitly obeyed; and the farmers and their families proceeded peacefully to perform their services to God, with the winds of winter blowing about their heads through the paneless and sashless windows of their church.

Just after the Ulster Volunteers had accomplished their purpose, and Mr Asquith had declared, what he might with advantage have announced sooner, that the coercion of Ulster by force was unthinkable a good many people about him had been thinking of it once and talking of it too -the great war broke out, and the Volunteers joined up and formed the famous Ulster Division. Many of them never came back, many came back orippled for life, and many came back to find that in their absence their jobs had been taken by Sinn Feiners. The last was a grievance dwelt on bitterly by the shipbuilders who ejected the Sinn Feiners from the shipyards. They had ceased to be the thoroughly organised and disciplined body they were in 1914. If they had been what they then were, there would have been no riots either at Derry or at Belfast.

Some fair-minded persons, while admitting the service the organisers of the Ulster Volunteers rendered in this way, may still think that they rendered a greater disservice by their arming the people to resist the law by force. It was this, they argue, which led the Nationalists also to organise and arm their volunteers, which Was the cause of the subsequent rebellion and the present state of war in the South and West of Ireland. Such a view indioates either ignorance or disregard of Irish history. Every Nationalist movement for centuries past has followed the

same lines: it begins as & moderate claim led by moderate men, and it ends in a demand for independence led by armed extremists. Such was the first volunteer movement. At first its claim was for freedom of legislation and trade, and its leaders were Grattan and Charlemont; in the end its claim was independence secured by rebellion, and its leaders were Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Theobald Wolfe Tone. O'Connell's constitu-. tional claim for Repeal of the Union in the same way changed into the Young Ireland movement and another rising. The Pope's Brass Band, with its leaders on the Treasury Bench, developed in time into the Fenian conspiracy with its leaders in Richmond Prison. Mr Parnell kept the physical force party under control longer than any other leader. That was due partly to his marvellous strength of character, and partly to his constantly assuring the party that he did not, whatever he said in Parliament, mean that Home Rule was to be the boundaries of the nation's progress. When he went, it was only a matter of time and opportunity when the physical force party would tire of the talkers and resort to action. The time, to sensible observers, was pretty near before the war broke out; the outbreak of the war supplied the opportunity.

This, then, is the state of affairs in Ireland as they stand revealed by the Ulster riots. There are a populace in the South and West who are resolved to have separation, and