I have no desire to offer in the present pages a re-hash of a former work of mine, which is said to have provoked the Scotch to the point of laughter. But I do desire to assert that, in my humble opinion, it is the Scotch, or alien population of Ireland, which has been at the root of Ireland’s principal troubles throughout the past century. Ulster may be a fine kingdom, the wealthiest, most industrious, and the wisest and happiest in the country, if you like. Yet it is Ulster that bars the way in all matters that make for the real good of Ireland. Every proper Irishman knows this, and Ulstermen will be at no pains to deny it. Rather are they disposed to glory in it and to brag about it. Ireland, they will tell you, is their[51] country. It is they who have made it, they who have saved it, they who have enriched, beautified and adorned it. They point to the linen industry and to the shipbuilding industry; they crack about Belfast and Portadown, and about “eminent Ulstermen in every walk of life.” There would be no Ireland at all if it were not for themselves. They rule Ireland. What Ireland wants she may have, if it pleases Ulster. What Ireland does not want she must have, if Ulster so much as nod. That, at any rate, is the view of Ulster, the view of the thrifty, douce Scotch bodies whose fathers got gifts of other people’s lands from James I. of England and VI. of Scotland, and whose sons go up and down and to and fro upon the earth, calling themselves “Irishmen of Scotch descent.” There are no Irishmen of Scotch descent. And Ulstermen are not Irishmen unless their descent be Irish. Failing this, they are simply interlopers, or, at best, colonists and plantation men, and they had best put the fact[52] in their pipes and smoke it. Nobody can deny that it was a bad day for Ireland when they came grabbing and grubbing to her shores, just as it was a bad day for England when she “took up” with them. They got Ulster for nothing, and they have kept it for “that same.” They have lived and waxed fat on Irish plunder, and the whole force of English legislation has been directed toward maintaining them in their place, fostering their projects, pampering and propitiating them, and “protecting” them against the wicked, degraded, unreasonable Irish outside. Nor have they been content to confine their greedy attention to their own proper “kingdom,” which is not theirs. Where the carcass is, there will the vulture be; and where there is a soft job, or obvious pickings, there you will find a Scotchman. So that throughout Ireland, Scotchmen have been scattered wherever the Government could find a place for one. There is scarcely an office, sub-office, or sub-deputy office worth[53] the having in all Ireland which has not been made the perquisite of a Protestant Scotchman. Even the Congested Districts Board employs Scotch factors, and Thom’s Almanac is little more than a catalogue of Scotch patronymics. And the pride and insolence and unfairness of them! From a booklet called The Scot in Ulster, written by a Scotchman, and published, if you please, by Blackwood’s of Edinburgh, I take the following: “Their English and Scotch origin seems to me to give to the men of Ulster an unalienable right to protest, as far as they are concerned, against the policy of separation from Great Britain to which the Irish, with the genius for nicknames which they possess, at present give the name of Home Rule.” Could sophistry, craft, subtlety, disingenuousness, or the Scotch genius for cunning misrepresentation go further? To say that when the Irish people have said Home Rule they meant separation, is to promulgate a deliberate and wily untruth. The Irish people proper invariably[54] mean what they say, no more and no less. Home Rule never meant more nor less to the Irish than “a parliament on college green.” It was the Scotch, and the Scotch alone, who set up the cry of “separation” for a bugbear and a bogy wherewith to frighten the timorous English ruler into stubborn acquiescence in the Scotch view of Irish affairs. Yet here we have a Scotchman assuring us in cold print that Home Rule is merely an Irish “nickname” for “separation.” I note with considerable satisfaction, however, that, as Scotchmen will, the author of The Scot in Ulster proceeds religiously to give away the whole Scotch-Irish question. “For centuries,” says he, “the Scot had been wont to wander forth over Europe in search of adventure. [The italic is ............