Sir, - I was amused by the cheek of Ian Bell ("Home Rule will open the door for own rule", September 3rd) in his attempt to enlist Robert Louis Stevenson as a Scottish nationalist.Stevenson was a unionist. In his essay Confessions of a Unionist (1888), for example, he argued that Home Rule for Ireland should not be discussed until violence had been suppressed :"We will not, at the moment, so much as discuss the question of home rule. With all the lessons of history at our back, we will grant nothing that shall even appear to be extorted by brutality and murder. We shall see the law paramount, before we talk of its reform."He went on to criticise Americans for their gullibility in falling for Irish nationalist propaganda.Throughout this essay, and in all of his essays, he used the terms "England" and "Britain" as synonyms. He referred to England as home, and spoke of "the English" as "we" and "us".I have no doubt that if Stevenson were alive today he would endorse George Orwell's view of nationalism: "By Nationalism I mean the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled `good' or `bad'. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality." (Notes on National- ism, 1945). - Yours, etc.,Paul Rowlandson,Hillview Avenue, Derry.