formed
an inextricable jumble of irrelevant material, in which bad logic, bad
history, and barren invective were confusedly intermingled in a torrent
of turgid rhetoric. The extent of its range may be judged from the fact
that Shakespeare's allusions to Joan of Arc were not deemed too remote
from the subject of conscription in Ireland during the Great War to find
a place in this amazing despatch. For the amusement of anyone who may
care to examine so rare a curiosity of English prose, it will be found
in full in the Appendix to this volume, where it may be compared by way
of contrast with the restrained rejoinder sent also to President Wilson
by Sir Edward Carson, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, the Mayor of Derry, and
several loyalist representatives of Labour in Ulster.

In the Nationalist letter to President Wilson reference was made more
than once to the sympathy that prevailed in Ireland in the eighteenth
century with the American colonists in the War of Independence. The use
made of it was a good example of the way in which a half-truth may, for
argumentative purposes, be more misleading than a complete falsehood.
"To-day, as in the days of George Washington"--so Mr. Wilson was
informed--"nearly half the American forces have been furnished from the
descendants of our banished race." No mention was made of the fact that
the members of the "banished race" in Washington's army were
Presbyterian emigrants from Ulster, who formed almost the entire
population of great districts in the American Colonies at that
time.[102] The late Mr. Whitelaw Reid told an Edinburgh audience in 1911
that more than half the Presbyterian population of Ulster emigrated to
America between 1730 and 1770, and that at the date of the Revolution
they made more than one-sixth of the population of the Colonies. The
Declaration of Independence itself, he added--

"Is sacredly preserved in the handwriting of an Ulsterman, who was
Secretary of Congress. It was publicly read by an Ulsterman, and
first printed by another. Washington's first Cabinet had four
members, of whom one was an Ulsterman."[103]

It is, of course, true that not all Ulster Presbyterians of that period
were the firm and loyal friends of Great Britain that their descendants
became after a century's experience of the legislative Union. But it is
the latter who best in Ireland can trace kinship with the founders of
the United States, and who are entitled--if any Iris