While emigration and famine have depopulated Ulster, while homesteads decreased and many towns went to decay under British rule in Ulster since the Union-taxation has increased:

An instructive document upon the comparative wealth of Irish industries, North and South, by George Russell, (A.E.), an Ulsterman and authority upon Irish trade, follows. It expands on the fact that the egg and poultry trade exports of Ireland for 1918 amounted to $41,500,000 more than the value of the ships built in Ireland this year:

"The theory that Ulster Unionists create most of the wealth of the country is demonstrably untrue. One has only to read the report on the Irish Trade in Imports and Exports and compare the values of exports from Nationalist Ireland with the values of exports from Unionist Ireland to realize that agricultural and Nationalist Ireland is the great wealth producer. But even in this we cannot take figures at their face value.

"The export of ships, mainly from Belfast, was valued in 1918 at £10,147,000, the highest recorded value, and the Belfast people are justly entitled to think with pride of these world-famous yards of theirs. But if we compare this output, not with the great cattle trade, but with one of the minor branches of Irish agricultural industry, the egg and poutry trade, shipbuilding as a wealth creating industry assumes its proper place.

"The women on the farms in Ireland who have charge of the poultry without any advertisement at all, or any expressed vanity about their industry were able to export eggs and poultry in 1918 valued at £18,449,310. Now the point about this total as compared with the value of the output of the shipbuilders is that the nominal values do not indicate the real wealth created. Practically all the £18,449,310 was new wealth created out of the earth and not five per cent of the feeding stuffs used were imported.

"If we look at the imports we see the immense sums paid for steel, iron, coal and other raw materials to enable the shipbuilders to get to work, so that less new wealth is created in one industry than in the other pound for pound in value. And this applies to almost all the industries carried on in Nationalist Ireland; a much smaller percentage of raw materials required is imported, and more real wealth is created not only nominally, but if we examine into the means of production we find that there is more actual profit for the producer in every pound of final value than in the case of the manufacturing industries in North-East Ulster.

"I do not wish to depreciate in any way the magnificent energy of Ulster Irishmen. They have a right to be proud of what they have achieved, but it is not right to speak of that corner of Ireland, as so many do, as the wealth-creating centre. It will really suffer much more

than the rest of Ireland under the regime Mr. Lloyd George has devised for it.

"He has cleverly taken their own valuation of their wealth-producing capacity, and he demands from six Ulster Counties a tribute of £7,920,000 annually. This will go to pay British workmen not Belfast workmen. I believe it will not take my Ulster countrymen very long to find out who really is oppressing them."

English statesmen, following the slogan adopted by Lord Randolph Churchill in opposition to Parnell's movement, and taken up in 1914 by another Englishman, F. E. Smith, M.P., claim that Ulstermen will fight to retain Ulster under English rule instead of under their own.

In view of the weight of evidence set out by the foregoing statistics this assumption on the part of English statesmen is not a tribute to the shrewd business sense, any more than to the patriotism of the Ulsterman.

THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES

Differences of religious belief are held to create an irreconcilable gulf between Irishmen in Ulster-because it has been the consistent policy of English statesmen to keep them divided, or to create a widespread impression that they are so divided. The workings of this "Divide and Conquer" policy of empires is clearly traceable in Ulster from the Boyne down to the present Home Rule plan of a "separate Ulster."

Religious strife was first aroused in Ireland after the Boyne, which was represented as a religious battle instead of what it was a phase of the old struggle between the Gael and the Saxon, as Bannockburn, Benburb and Culloden were.

Every device was utilized from that time forward to raise hostility between Protestant, and Catholic-solely to strengthen England's hold on Ireland.

At the time of Dean Swift's agitation against Wood's Halfpence, Boulter, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh, wrote:

"The worst of this is that it stands to unite Protestant and Papist; and whenever that happens-goodbye to the English interest in Ireland forever."

In 1779 Lord Grenville wrote to the British Lord Lieutenant of Ireland:

"I cannot help feeling a very great anxiety that such measures may be taken as may effectually counteract the union between Catholics and Dissenters (Presbyterians) at which the latter are evidently aiming. There is no evil I would not prophesy of if that union takes place."

When a delegation of Irishmen, including Grattan, interviewed Pitt, urging the benefits of union and amity between Protestants and Catholics, Pitt replied:

"Ay, but whose will they be when they come together?"

This union, the one natural union for Irishmen, having taken place, a United Ireland, in 1782 secured from England a free parliament and free trade. In 1783 the Irish Volunteers (Protestant) demanded the religious emancipation of their Catholic countrymen.

John Adams, writing from London to the President of Congress in 1783 of the plans of English statesmen to break this union said:

"Ireland is throwing off the admiralty, postoffice and every other relic of British parliamentary authority, and contending for a free importation of their woolen manufactures into Portugal, for the trade to the East Indies, to the United States of America, and all the rest of the world * * The Irish Volunteers are also coutending for a parliamentary reform and are assembling by their delegates in a congress at Dublin to accomplish it.

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"This rivalry of Ireland is terrible to the ministry; they are supposed to be at work to sow jealousies and divisions between the Protestants and Catholics of Ireland.'

English statesmen having set themselves to divide Ireland, the Earl of Westmoreland, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, wrote to Pitt in January, 1792:

"Conceiving the object of you and I to be

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how England can govern Ireland a country containing one-half as many inhabitants as herself and in may respects more advantageously situated, I hold the task not to be easy, but that the present frame of Irish government is particularly well calculated for our purpose. The frame is a Protestant garrison, in possession of the land, magistracy and power of the country holding that property under the tenure of British power and supremacy and ready at every instant to crush the rising of the conquered."

In 1798 the Presbyterians of North-East Ulster were as active in promoting the insurrection of that year as the Catholics of Wexford were, all aiming to establish an Irish Republic.

But in portions of the North false rumors were spread by the British Government that the Southern rising had a religious, an anti-Protestant, motive. Companies of Northern militia were then secured to aid in suppressing the Southern movement.

Simultaneously Catholic leaders were disturbed by whispers of atheistic doctrines and French principles" in the Republican movement.

To the Catholic Hierarchy, England's Premier, Pitt, presented Maynooth, a training college for priests, which the government endowed in the hope of controlling the national and political views of all its students. The Church of England was already fully endowed in Ireland-and as fully controlled.

The Presbyterian Church was approached by Lord Castlereagh with "a plan for strengthening the connection between the Government and the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster;" he aimed to prevent ministers of this Church from again taking an independent patriotic stand as they did in 1798.

The plan provided for attractive annual subsidies for all ministers "loyally disposed" toward British rule in Ireland. Dr. Killen, the Presbyterian historian, has recorded the effectiveness of these methods upon the Synod.

Having secured an entente with the clergy British statesmen then used their power over Ireland's economic resources to intensify the work of sowing dissension, forecasted by John Adams.

Their policy was checked by the disestablishment of the English Church, and by other democratic advances. It has been halted by increased facilities for communication between the people and the growing knowledge among all Irishmen of the source of their differences.

This alien plant of religious dissension has always been nurtured as a mainstay of English influence in Ireland and has alway had the support of Enland's adherents there. It has caused unhappiness and friction among the working classes of North-East Ulster, but it is an unnatural growth and has not destroyed the religious tolerance of the Irish Gael.

RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE OF THE IRISH NATION

Every claim that danger or discrimination would accrue to Ulster from a self-governed Ireland is based on the allegation that a Catholic majority in Ireland would use its power against that section of Ulster's population which subscribes to faiths other than the Catholic.

The entire history of the Irish race refutes this argument. Ample evidence concerning this Irish Catholic characteristic of religious tolerance is given by English and Protestant historians.

Protestant historians-Lecky, Leland, Laing, Fox, Sydney Smith, Taylor, Buckle and Hallam have recognized this native tolerance most strikingly exemplified perhaps in the Irish Constitution of Kilkenny (1646) and again in 1689, when full religious freedom and liberty of conscience. were guaranteed all Irishmen by enactments framed by Irish Catholics. The Irish took this stand in a century when the rest of Europe was torn with internecine wars marked by religious intolerance.

Hon. W. E. H. Lecky, in his History of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II, pp. 389-91, states of the Irish nation:

"Their original conversion to Christianity was probably accompanied by less violence and bloodshed than that of any equally considerable nation in Europe; and in spite of the fearful calamities which followed the Reformation, it is a memorable fact that not a single Protestant suffered for his religion in Ireland during all the period of the Marian persecution in England.

"The treatment of Bedell, a Protestant prelate, during the outbreak of 1641, and the Act establishing liberty of conscience, passed by the Irish Parliament in 1689, in the full flush of the brief Catholic ascendancy under James II, exhibit very remarkably this aspect of the Irish character; and it was displayed in another form scarcely less vividly during the Quaker missions, which began toward the close of the Commonwealth and continued with little intermission for two generations

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"The experience of (John) Wesley half a century later was very similar * * ** and he has more than once in his Journal spoken in terms of warm appreciation of the docile and tolerant spirit he almost everywhere encountered."

Rev. H. S. Lunn, an English clergyman and follower of Wesley, in reply to fears expressed in his day of Papal persecution in Ireland, stated: "He was met everywhere by misrepresentations of the facts of Irish history, and by a willful ignoring of those facts which was equally misleading * For his own part, it was not without much study that he had entered upon this conflict, but as he reviewed the

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history of Ireland, he found that the annals of Irish Catholicism, from its earliest date, were free from any record of persecution.

"And in the dark Middle Ages, when the English people were persecuting the Jews to extort from them their hidden treasures, once again the Irish occupied an unique position amongst European nations, and did not engage in such persecution."

"But there was one great lesson taught by universal history * that wherever the power of democratic self-government had been extended, a fatal blow had been struck at all persecution." The Chief Rabbi of the Jews, speaking at Dublin, Ireland, in 1871 stated:

"He had long been anxious for many reasons to visit this beautiful country; and amongst others because it was the only country in which his race had not been persecuted."-Jewish Chronicle, July 21, 1871. The cry that the Catholic majority in Ireland would persecute their Protestant countrymen is met by these further testimonies of Protestant authorities:

Taylor. in his History of the Civil Wars of Ireland, Vol. I, p. 169,

states:

"The restoration of the old religion was effected without violence. No persecution of the Protestants was attempted, and several of the English, who fled from the furious zeal of Mary's Inquisitors, found a safe retreat among the Catholics of Ireland. It is but justice to this maligned body to add that on the three occasions of their obtaining the upper hand they never injured a single person in life or limb for professing a religion different from their own. They had suffered persecution and learned mercy, as they showed in the reign of Mary, in the wars from 1641 to 1648, and during the brief triumph of James II."

In addition to evidences of the kindness and good will of Catholics Ireland toward the English Society of Friends, Wesleyans and Catholics when persecuted by their own English countrymen, the Irish Protestant historian, Mrs. John R. Green, in "Irish Nationality," dwells upon the welcome given by Catholic Ireland to the German Protestant Palatinates and the French Huguenots, both persecuted by their own countrymen. These different Protestant sects sought and found refuge in Ireland, among the Catholics of the South and still practice the Protestant faith without hindrance or discrimination by their Catholic neighbors.

Similar evidence is given by Alfred Webb, a Dublin member of the Society of Friends, who in Parnell's day received fifty letters from Protestants in all parts of Ireland replying to his queries concerning Irish Catholicism. The letter of Charles Eason, Manager of an extensive Englishowned business in Ireland, was typical:

I have never known an instance of Catholic intolerance toward me personally, nor toward the business I have governed, nor does my memory recall any case of intolerance from Catholics coming under my own knowledge at any time."

J. A. Fox, instancing the very large number of Protestants who have