greatest privileges obtainable by any community, and I
am not going down on my knees to beg an unwilling
Southern Ireland to enjoy this privilege.

Further, I hold that if we let the Southern Irish go, we
have a duty to the Protestants and Roman Catholic
loyalists, of whom, of course, there are a very great many
in the South. We have no right to force them to forfeit
their citizenship of the British Empire. They must be
allowed to come away from the South with full compensa-
tion for their disturbance if they so desire. If circum-
stances force you to denationalise a certain part of your
country, you must give the loyal inhabitants an oppor-
tunity to leave, and as far as possible must not allow their
material interests to suffer. It would be perfectly easy
to have exempted all persons in the South who were loyal
to Britain and to have put the burden of their migration
where it ought to have fallen -- that is, on the Southern
enemies of England and Scotland who, by their policy,
had made human life for the Protestants and Loyalists a
veritable hell.

If the South had refused to pay, we should ourselves
have taken on the burden and imposed a duty on agricul-
tural produce coming from the South of Ireland into
England sufficient to find the interest on a loan raised to
compensate the Southern refugees. That would be a
perfectly possible way, a very easy fiscal transaction.

I am not going to argue further whether these views on
the Irish problem are per se right or wrong. I can only
adopt with variation the party-politician's peroration:
"These, gentlemen, are my principles; if they don't suit,
they can't be altered."

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