die rather than trade with you." There will be lamentably and
inevitably a fiercer tone between North and South. Everything
that happens in one quarter will be distorted in the other. Each
will lie about the other. The materials will exist more than before
for civil commotion, and this will be aided by the powerful minority
of Nationalists in the excluded counties working in conjunction
with their allies across the border. Nothing was ever gained in
life by hatred; nothing good ever came of it or could come of it;
and the first and most important of all the commandments of the
spirit that there should be brotherhood between men will be
deliberately broken to the ruin of the spiritual life of Ireland.

18. So far from Irish Nationalists wishing to oppress Ulster, I
believe that there is hardly any demand which could be made, even
involving democratic injustice to themselves, which would not
willingly be granted if their Ulster compatriots would fling their
lot in with the rest of Ireland and heal the eternal sore. I ask
Ulster what is there that they could not do as efficiently in an
Ireland with the status and economic power of a self-governing
dominion as they do at present. Could they not build their ships
and sell them, manufacture and export their linens? What do they
mean when they say Ulster industries would be taxed? I cannot
imagine any Irish taxation which their wildest dreams imagined so
heavy as the taxation which they will endure as part of the United
Kingdom in future. They will be implicated in all the revolutionary
legislation made inevitable in Great Britain by the recoil on
society of the munition workers and disbanded conscripts. Ireland,
which luckily for itself, has the majority of its population
economically independent as workers on the land, and which, in the
development of agriculture now made necessary as a result of changes