A Protest

New Zealand Tablet, 1 November 1906, Page 9

A Protest

Sir Wilfrid- Laurier,; the noted Canadian statesman, had scarcely given his .recent pronouncement in favor of Home -Rule as an imperial question, when '■Straightway a barbarous noise environed him \ It was the voice of protest, and it came from the lustylungs of our old friends 1 of the Saffron Sash. So much" we learn from Monday's. cables. It was not ever thus. In the days when the Union was being engineered « bybribery, force, and fraud, \ the measure had no more strenuous opponents than . were to be found among the ranks of the Irish Orangemen. Great numbers of lodges petitioned" against the Union; and the 'yellow' Home Rulers of those stirring times carried on a lively agitation in favor of ' the Old House in College Green '- until Beresford, their political standard-bearer, sold hii pountry.and his vote for , gold. Then, by order of the Dublin Grand Lodge, the a brethren, brought their Home Rule campaign to -an end. - But in those times no Papist ' could sit as a! representative in an Irish Parliament; Under the same conditions, Sir Wilfrid Launer's latest .critics would probably be as- ardent Home Rulers as their forbears were a hundred and six years ago: -