Yet in the very process of achieving this success Redmond laid himself open to attack. The Budget was regarded with dislike by a very large section of Irishmen, and apart from considerations of political strategy the Irish members would certainly have voted against it. Now, the power was in their hands to defeat it finally. By so doing they would, of course, justify to some degree the unconstitutional action of the Lords; but this consideration did not weigh with Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Healy. They accused Redmond of selling the real interests of Ireland to keep a Government in office which could offer nothing in return but a gambling chance of limiting the veto of the Lords. Mr. O'Brien was firmly confident that no such measure would ever pass. He denounced the bargain, not merely because it was a bargain in which Redmond accepted what was in his view a ruinous injustice to Ireland, but because it was a bargain in which the Irish had been outwitted. This line of argument was to be dinned into the ears of Ireland during all the remaining years of Redmond's life. The only conclusive answer to it was to gain Home Rule. If, in the long run, it came to appear that the attackers had been right in their contention, and that Ireland had never received the expected return, the fault for that result lay with Ireland itself no less than with England; it most assuredly did not lie with John Redmond. A great weight of responsibility rests on those who from the first hour of Ireland's opportunity ingeminated distrust to an over-suspicious people.

For the moment, however, the attack made no headway. Irishmen have a shrewd political sense, and they felt that in the struggle to pin Liberal Ministers to the true fighting objective Redmond had won. They were also delighted to see the Irish party openly exert its power—not quite realizing that such exhibitions were against the interest of the democratic alliance, which had to undergo a grave test. The Government's vacillation had rendered another general election necessary if the Veto question were to be fought out.

On April 29th the House adjourned for the Whitsuntide recess, after which the crisis was to come with the decision of the House of Lords whether to accept or reject the Veto Resolution, which had then passed the Commons. On May 7th, after a short and sudden illness, King Edward died. Both the great English parties were unwilling to renew the most acute political struggle of modern times at the opening of a new reign, and means of accommodation was sought through a Conference which sat first on June 16th and held twenty-one meetings. No representative of Ireland was on this body. On November 10th it reported that no result had come of its efforts, and a new general election was fixed for December 1st.

When the Conference finally broke down Redmond was on his way back from America, whither he had gone accompanied by Mr. Devlin. Mr. T.P. O'Connor at the same time undertook a tour in Canada. The success of these missions showed that the interest and the confidence of the Irish race were higher than at any previous period: the ambassadors brought back a contribution of one hundred thousand dollars to the election funds, and the ship on which they came was saluted by bonfires all along the coast of Cork. Ireland, too, was subscribing as Ireland had not subscribed since Parnell's zenith: and this was an Ireland in which the land-hunger had been largely appeased. The theory that Ireland's demand for self-government was merely generated by Ireland's poverty began to look ridiculous.

It was the cue of the Tory Press at this moment to excite prejudice against the Liberals by representing them as the bondslaves of the "dollar dictator"—ordered about by an Irish autocrat with swollen money-bags from New York. This line of argument did us little harm in Great Britain; in Ireland it improved Redmond's position, for it was a useful answer to Mr. O'Brien's representation of him as the abject tool of Liberal politicians. The election, on the whole, strengthened our party. Mr. Healy was thrown out; and Mr. O'Brien, though he retained the seven seats held by his adherents in Cork, failed in two out of three personal candidatures.

In Great Britain the second election of the year 1910 had the surprising result of reproducing almost exactly the same division of parties: and this added greatly to the strength of the Government. The Tory leaders now, instead of insisting on a maintenance of the old Constitution, went into alternative proposals—including the adoption of the Referendum. This was their constructive line; the destructive resolved itself largely into an endeavour to focus resistance on the question of Ireland—the purpose for which alone, they said, abolition of the veto was demanded. As has often happened, action taken by the Vatican gave the opponents of Home Rule a useful weapon. The Ne Temere decree, promulgated in the year 1908, laid down that any marriage to which a Roman Catholic was a party, if not solemnized according to the rites of the Church of Rome, should be treated as invalid from a canonical point of view. Although legally binding, it should be regarded as no marriage in the eyes of an orthodox Roman Catholic until it was regularized in the manner provided by the Church, The case of an unhappy mixed marriage in Belfast was exploited with fury on a thousand platforms. Another decree, the Motu Proprio, was construed as seeking to establish immunity for the clergy from proceedings in civil courts. This, however, was of less platform value, because no instance could be found of a practical application; whereas the McCann case unquestionably gave Tory disputants a formidable instrument for evoking the ancient distrust of Roman Catholicism which is so deeply ingrained in the Protestant mind.

In spite of all, the English democracy remained steady in its purpose. Party feeling, however, ran to heights not known in living memory. In July 1911 the Parliament Bill went to the Lords, where it was altered out of all recognition. On July 20th Mr. Asquith sent a letter to Mr. Balfour stating that the King had guaranteed that he would exercise his prerogative to secure that the Bill should be passed substantially as it left the Commons. On the 24th the extreme section of the Tory party, headed by Lord Hugh Cecil, refused to allow the Prime Minister a hearing in the House of Commons.

From an Irish point of view the episode was noteworthy. At the outset of this critical session Redmond had cautioned his party to abstain from giving provocation and from allowing themselves to be provoked. The counsel was the harder to follow because some of the most vehement of the younger Tories sat below the gangway, almost in physical contact with Irish members, and hot words passed. Still, it was grounded into all that we should not allow the great issue then at trial to be represented as an Irish quarrel. Our cause was linked with the whole cause of democracy as against privilege: it was an issue for the whole United Kingdom; and that was never plainer than on this day of July. English, Scottish and Welsh members hurled interruptions and taunts at each other across the floor of the House, while Irish members sat watching. Something older and more far-reaching than the opposition to Ireland's demand now was felt itself assailed; and a force in which the Irish movement was only one stream of many swept against it. Anger in the Tory party was not directed against Ireland's representatives; and an odd chance made this plain. The fierce scene in the House reached its culmination when Ministers withdrew in a body from the Treasury Bench and the two sides of the House stood up, one cheering, the other hooting, in opposite ranks. For a moment it seemed as if the affair would come to blows, till Mr. Will Crooks, with a genial inspiration, uplifted his voice in song: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot?" The tension was relaxed and members moved out in groups—we Irishmen necessarily among the Tories. In the movement I saw Willie Redmond go up to one of the fiercest among the Ulstermen, whose face was dark with passion. Colloquy began: "Isn't it a hard thing that you wouldn't let us speak?" The Ulsterman turned: "Not let you speak? My dear fellow, we'd listen to you for as long as you liked—it's only these accursed English Liberals." And upon this mutual understanding the two Irishmen walked down the floor into the Lobby exchanging expressions of mutual goodwill and possibly of mutual comprehension.

This little piece of by-play, so full of Irish nature, struck me at the time as something more than amusing—as having in it a ray of hopeful significance. But the most sanguine imagination would never have foreseen the series of events which brought it to pass, not merely that these two men should wear the same uniform, on a common service, but that the same Gazette should publish both their names as enrolled on the same day in the French Legion of Honour. On that day Mr. Charles Craig was a prisoner in Germany, wounded in a famous fight; and Willie Redmond was in a grave towards which Ulster comrades had been the first to carry him. There is an Irish saying, "Men may meet, but the mountains stand apart." In July 1911 such an association as the Gazette of July 1917 illustrated would have seemed hardly more possible than the meeting of the everlasting hills.

The dramatic crisis of the parliamentary struggle between the two Houses of Parliament did not, and could not, come in the House of Commons. Its place was in the final citadel of privilege, and privilege surrendered on August 10th, when the Bill passed the Lords after the most exciting and uncertain division that is ever likely to be known. But there were elements in the Tory party which did not accept defeat, though they had not yet clearly decided on what battleground to renew their efforts. For the moment, however, men were disposed to pause and take stock of the new situation.

But at such a time events cannot stand still, and almost at the same moment as the Parliament Act was carried, the Government took a step which gravely affected the Irish party. Payment of members was established by a resolution of the House of Commons.

Irish Nationalist members had always been paid from the party fund, that is to say, by their supporters. Payment was conditional, not of right, and it was not made except when the member was in attendance: it amounted only to twenty pounds a month. The new payment came from the British Treasury; it was made irrespective of the desire of constituents, or of any other consideration; and it amounted to a sum which in a country of small incomes sounded very imposing. Unquestionably the receipt of it weakened the position of the party in the eyes of Ireland, and gave a new sting to the charge of a bargain.

All this was clearly discerned in advance, by no one more than by Redmond; and an amendment was moved to strike Irish members out of the application of the resolution. But the situation was hopelessly involved, the Irish party having repeatedly voted for payment of members as part of the Radical programme which they supported as affecting any normally governed country; and Government refused to make the exception.

As a result, Redmond's following lost much of the prestige which had resulted from scrupulous observance of the understanding that no Nationalist member should take office under Government. To join the Irish party had been, in effect, for most men, to make a vow of poverty. Now, on the contrary, it involved acceptance of what was in Ireland's eyes a well-paid and unlaborious office. The Irish are no less prone than any other nation to take a cynical view of these matters.

Yet assuredly no man ever gave more service for less pay than the Nationalist leader, and it was the harder because he was a man who liked comfort and had no ambition. If at the time of the great "split" he had stood down from politics, success would have been assured to him at the Bar in Ireland, or, more surely still, and far more profitably, at Westminster itself. There never was anyone so well-fitted for the work of a parliamentary barrister who has to deal with great interests before a tribunal largely composed of laymen. No one had the House of Commons tone more perfectly than Redmond, and no one that I ever heard equalled his gift for making a complicated issue appear simple. When he was thrown out of Parliament at the Cork election, he thought of retirement, mainly for one reason: it would be better for his children. Yet, first by personal loyalty to Parnell, later by his loyalty to Ireland, he was held firm to his task—always a poor man, always knowing that it lay in his power, without the least sacrifice of principle, to become rich by a way of work less laborious and infinitely less harassing than that which he pursued.

The effect upon the Irish situation produced by the payment of members was slow to develop, and obscure. But an obvious and grave complication was introduced into both British and Irish politics at the moment when the democratic alliance had achieved its first great objective. Parliament had been in session almost continuously since the beginning of 1909, with the added strain of two general elections thrown in. There was a widespread desire to clear the autumn of 1911, so that members might have some breathing space, and, not less important, devote themselves to propagandist work in their constituencies for the new struggle of carrying measures under the hardly won Parliament Act. Each of these measures must involve a fight prolonged over three years.

But this desire ran against the purposes of Mr. Asquith's chief lieutenant, whose power and popularity were now at their height. Mr. Lloyd George in the course of the session had introduced his Insurance Bill, and it was welcomed with astonishing effusion from both sides of the House. As discussion proceeded, however, the complexity and difficulty of its proposals, and the number of oppositions which they provoked, became so apparent that it was not in human nature for politicians at such a crisis to forgo the opportunity. Most of the Liberal party would have preferred to drop the Bill temporarily and refer it to a Committee of Enquiry. Mr. Lloyd George was convinced that this would be fatal to his measure, concerning which he was possessed by a missionary zeal. Probably when his career comes under the study of impartial history it will be perceived that never at any moment was he so passionately and so honestly in earnest as upon this quest. But it is certain that by pursuit of it he created enormous difficulties in the way of those reforms which the democratic alliance at large most desired to achieve. He carried his point; an autumn session followed, in which the mind of the electorate was diverted from the Irish question and all other questions except that of Insurance, and Parliament itself was jaded to the brink of exhaustion.

The matter was difficult for us in Ireland because, owing to the different system of Public Health Administration, many of the most important provisions could not apply, and because the Bill as a whole was framed to meet the needs of a highly industrialized and crowded community. Broadly speaking, it was less desired in Ireland than in Great Britain; and even for Great Britain Mr. Lloyd George was legislating in advance of public opinion rather than in response to it. Mr. O'Brien and his following vehemently opposed the application of the Bill to Ireland; and the Irish Catholic Bishops, by a special resolution, expressed their view to the same effect. The Bill, however, had a powerful advocate in Mr. Devlin, and the Irish party decided to support its extension to Ireland, subject to certain modifications which they obtained.

Apart from the new unsettlement of public opinion which it created both in Great Britain and in Ireland, the Insurance Act added to our difficulties on the Home Rule question. It was clear already that the question of finance lay like a rock ahead. Up to 1908 the proceeds of Irish revenue had always given a margin over the cost of all Irish services, though that margin had dwindled almost to vanishing-point. Old Age Pensions completely turned the beam and left us in the position of costing more than we contributed. Now the outlay on Insurance added half a million a year to the balance against us.

Still, difficulties and perplexities were not limited to one side. The Tory party were much divided since the crisis on the Parliament Act. A section, and the most active section, had been violently opposed to the surrender on the critical division, and these men were profoundly discontented with Mr. Balfour's leadership; so Mr. Balfour, yielding to intimations, suddenly resigned. Somewhat unexpectedly, Mr. Bonar Law was chosen to succeed him, Mr. Long and Mr. Chamberlain waiving their respective claims.

This choice was of sinister augury. Mr. Law did not know Ireland. But, Canadian-born, he came from a country in which the Irish factions and theological enmities had always had their counterpart; his father, a Presbyterian Minister, came of Ulster stock. All the blood in him instinctively responded to the tap of the Orange drum. As far back as January 27, 1911, he had urged armed resistance to Home Rule.

This was a line which Mr. Balfour did not see his way to take, and probably here rather than elsewhere lay the reason for the choice of Mr. Bonar Law. The most active section of the Tory party—probably a minority, for in such cases minorities decide—regarded the passing of the Parliament Act as an outrage on the Constitution, which should be resisted by any means, constitutional or unconstitutional. But no possibility existed of mobilizing a force in Great Britain to fight for the veto of the House of Lords, nor again did the resistance to a new Franchise Act, or even to Welsh Disestablishment, promise to be desperate. In one part only of these islands was there material for a form of struggle in which the ballot-box and the division lobby might be supplemented, if not replaced, by quite other methods of political war. The Tory party saw in Ulster their best fighting chance. There was no use in telling them that they jeopardized the British Constitution; from their point of view the British Constitution—as they had known it—was already gone; it was destroyed in principle and must be either restored or refashioned according to their mind.

This temper, with the attitude towards parliamentary tradition which it produced, rendered the political history of the next two and a half years unlike any other in the history of these countries. The main purpose of this book is to record and illustrate Redmond's action during the period which began with the opening of the Great War. But since that action was conditioned by the circumstances preceding the war—since in two notable ways it aimed at a solution of the fierce political struggle which the war interrupted—the political history connected with the passage of the Home Rule Bill through Parliament must be outlined in detail, with avoidance, so far as may be, of a controversial tone.

V

It is however necessary, before closing this preliminary review, to take some account of Redmond's relation to his party, and, in general, of the working of the parliamentary machine. Difficulties were imposed on him and on the party from 1910 onwards by our very success.

Electoral chances had placed us apparently in the position of maximum power. From January 1910 onwards we had a Government committed to Home Rule, yet so far dependent on us that we could put it out at any moment. Yet this was by no means an ideal state of affairs. The Government's weakness was our weakness, and they were liable to the reproach that they never proposed a Home Rule measure except when they could not dispense with the Irish vote. Still, from this embarrassing position we achieved an extraordinary result. Right across our path was the obstacle of the House of Lords. It was not an impassable barrier for measures in which the British working classes were keenly interested—for it let the Trades Disputes Bill go through; but it was wholly regardless of Irish and of Welsh popular opinion. Under Redmond's leadership we smashed the House of Lords. The English middle class instinct for compromise was asserting itself, when he took hold and gave direction to the great mass of popular indignation which the hereditary chamber had roused against itself.

Yet guiding action in an alliance of which he was not the head was delicate work. A clumsy speaker in debate might do infinite mischief. When a party is in opposition, all its members can talk, and are encouraged to talk, to the utmost; little harm can be done to one's own side by what is said in criticism of measures proposed. Support and exposition is a much more ticklish business. Add to this the fact that under the fully developed system of parliamentary obstruction—that is, of using discussion to prevent legislation from being put through—the best service that a member can render to Government is to say nothing, but vote.

The tactics of limiting discussion to chosen speakers in important debates and of discouraging sharply any intervention which might help to delay a division were pushed further in the Irish party than elsewhere. We were there under different conditions from the rest; our objective was as clearly defined as in a military operation: and we all understood the position. We recognized also that negotiation must be a matter for Redmond and his inner cabinet of three, and that many things could not be usefully discussed in a body of seventy men. But the net result was that the bulk of the party lost interest in their work, and, which was worse, that Ireland lost interest in the bulk of the party. It followed, not unnaturally, that the constituencies held one voting machine to be as good as another, and they did not generally send any men who could have been of service in debate. They did not any longer see their members heading a fiery campaign against rents, or flamboyant in attack on the Government; they heard very little of them at all. They knew little and cared less about the work of education in British constituencies, which had to be carried on through the mouths of Irish members.

Redmond has often been blamed, but quite unjustly, for failure to attract men of talent into his ranks. Parnell had that power. He had, and used, the right of suggesting names. But under the constitution of the United Irish League (originally the work of Mr. William O'Brien when reunion was accomplished in 1900) the machinery of local conventions was set up and no interference with their choice was permitted to the central directorate—which could only insist that a man properly selected must take the party pledge. Whether this machinery was inevitable or no, cannot be argued here; but Redmond himself complained repeatedly in public that it worked badly. Candidates were often chosen purely for local and even personal considerations, and seldom with any real thought of finding the man best fitted to do Ireland's work at Westminster.

This evil, for it was an evil, resulted from the political stagnation in a country where one dominant permanent issue overshadowed all others. There being no Unionist candidature possible in the majority of constituencies, any contest was deprecated—and from some points of view rightly—as leading to possible faction between Nationalists. The choice of a member really fell into too few hands; the electorate as a whole was not sufficiently interested. Nevertheless, several able men came into our ranks, and under the conditions it was not possible to utilize their talents fully, as they would have been utilized had we been in opposition, not in support of the Government. More could have been done, however, to give them their opportunity, and the responsibility for not varying the list of speakers rests on Redmond. It was his policy to avoid personal intervention, and to leave such choices to be settled by proposals from the party itself. This was a real limitation to his excellence as leader—for leader he was.

There was, however, an even more important limitation arising out of his personal temperament. As chairman, I never expect to see his equal. He had the most perfect public manners of any man I have known, whether in dealing with some vast assembly or small confidential gathering. The latter type of meeting is the more difficult to handle, and nothing could exceed his gift for presiding over and guiding debate. He could set out a political situation to his party with extraordinary force and lucidity. He could also, when he chose, so present an issue as to suggest almost irresistibly the conclusion which he desired—and this was how he led. Where he came short in the quality of leadership was in the personal contact.

His relations with all his followers in the party were courteous and cordial; yet without the least appearance of aloofness he was always aloof. He did not invite discussion. It needed some courage to go to him with a question in policy, and if you went, the answer would be simply a "Yes" or "No." He lacked what Lord Morley attributed to Gladstone, "the priceless gift of throwing his mind into common stock." No one thought more constantly, or further ahead; but he could not, rather than would not, impart his mind by bringing it into contact with others. Men like being taken into their leader's confidence, and he knew this and, I have reason to believe, knew the disability which his temperament laid upon him. Yet he never made an effort to combat it, partly I think from pride, for he hated everything that savoured of earwigging; he was not going to put constraint upon himself that his following might be more enthusiastic. There was no make-believe about him, and he was never one who liked discussion for discussion's sake.

Profoundly conservative, he had no welcome for novel points of view. I cannot put it more strongly than by saying that he was more apparently aware of the qualities which made T.M. Kettle difficult to handle in his team than of those which made that brilliant personality an ornament and a force in our party. A more serious aspect of this conservatism was the separation which it produced between him and the newer Ireland. He welcomed the Gaelic League and disliked Sinn Fein, but undervalued both as forces: he was never really in touch with either of them. Ideally speaking, he ought to have seen to it that his party, which represented mainly the standpoint of Parnell's day, was kept in sympathy with the new Young Ireland.

But from the point of view of those who shared his outlook—and they were the vast majority, in Ireland and in the party—Redmond's essential limitation, as a leader, was that he lacked the magnetic qualities which produce idolatry and blind allegiance. What his followers gave him was admiration, liking and profound respect. No less than this was strictly due to his high standard of honour, his scorn of all personal pettiness, his control of temper. In twelve years I heard many complaints of the manner in which things were managed in the party: I scarcely ever remember to have heard anyone complain of him. He was always spoken of as "The Chairman"; no one attributed to him sole responsibility; and he was the last on whom any man desired to lay a fault.

Yet when it came, as it often did, to a question of weighing advices one against the other, there was no mistake how men's opinions inclined. He had taught his party by experience to have almost implicit confidence in his judgment; and by this earned confidence he led and he ruled.



CHAPTER III

THE HOME RULE BILL OF 1912

The year 1912, in which the straight fight on Home Rule was to begin, opened stormily. Mr. Churchill was announced to speak under the auspices of the Ulster Liberal Association in the Ulster Hall at Belfast. It was the hall in which his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had used the famous phrase "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right." Belfast was determined that the son should not unsay what the father had said in this consecrated building; it would be, as an Ulster member put it in the House of Commons, "a profanation." On this first round, Ulster won; Mr. Churchill spoke at Belfast, but not in the Ulster Hall. There were angry demonstrations against him; his person had to be strongly protected and he went away from the meeting by back streets. It was noticeable that no such precautions were needed for Redmond, who attended the meeting and walked quite unmolested through the crowd. The British electorate, as a whole, was somewhat scandalized by the exhibition of so violent a temper; but the education of the British electorate was only beginning.

Congestion of business from the previous session deferred the introduction of the Home Rule Bill till April. Great demonstrations for and against it were held in advance. In Dublin on March 31st was such a gathering as scarcely any man remembered. O'Connell Street is rather a boulevard than a thoroughfare; it is as wide as Whitehall and its length is about the same. On that day, from the Parnell monument at the north end to the O'Connell monument at the south, you could have walked on the shoulders of the people. Four separate platforms were erected, and Redmond spoke from that nearest to the statue of his old chief. He dwelt on the universality of the demonstration; nine out of eleven corporations were represented officially by their civic officers; professional men, business men, were all fully to the fore. But one section of his countrymen were conspicuously absent. To Ulster he had this to say:

"We have not one word of reproach or one word of bitter feeling. We have one feeling only in our hearts, and that is an earnest longing for the arrival of the day of reconciliation."

A feature of that gathering, little noted at the time, assumes strange significance in retrospect. At one platform Patrick Pearse, then headmaster of St. Enda's school, spoke in Irish. What he said may be thus roughly rendered:

"There are as many men here as would destroy the British Empire if they were united and did their utmost. We have no wish to destroy the British, we only want our freedom. We differ among ourselves on small points, but we agree that we want freedom, in some shape or other. There are two sections of us—one that would be content to remain under the British Government in our own land, another that never paid, and never will pay, homage to the King of England. I am of the latter, and everyone knows it. But I should think myself a traitor to my country if I did not answer the summons to this gathering, for it is clear to me that the Bill which we support to-day will be for the good of Ireland and that we shall be stronger with it than without it. I am not accepting the Bill in advance. We may have to refuse it. We are here only to say that the voice of Ireland must be listened to henceforward. Let us unite and win a good Act from the British; I think it can be done. But if we are tricked this time, there is a party in Ireland, and I am one of them, that will advise the Gael to have no counsel or dealings with the Gall [the foreigner] for ever again, but to answer them henceforward with the strong hand and the sword's edge. Let the Gall understand that if we are cheated once more there will be red war in Ireland."

The platform where Pearse spoke was set up within a stone's throw of the General Post Office in which, four years later, he was to give effect to the words he spoke then and to earn his own death in undoing the work of Redmond's lifetime. At that moment no one heeded his utterance, nor the speech, also in Irish, of Professor John MacNeill from another platform, which went, as its speaker was destined to go, half the way with Pearse.

But Redmond never attempted to conceal the existence of this element in Ireland. Speaking on the introduction of the Home Rule Bill on April 11th, he dealt at the very opening with the charge that the Irish people wanted separation and that the Irish leaders were separatists in disguise:

"I will be perfectly frank on this matter. There always has been, and there is to-day, a certain section of Irishmen who would like to see separation from this country. They are a small, a very small section. They were once a very large section. They are a very small section, but the men who hold, these views at this moment only desire separation as an alternative to the present system, and if you change the present system and give into the hands of Irishmen the management of purely Irish affairs, even that small feeling in favour of separation will disappear; and if it survives at all, I would like to know how under those circumstances it could be stronger or more powerful for mischief than at the present moment."

Sincerer words were never spoken, nor, I think, a better justified forecast. Where Redmond and all of us were wrong was that we underestimated the possibility of accomplishing what Pearse ultimately accomplished, even when assisted by the widespread disillusionment and sense of betrayal which was the atmosphere of 1916.

But no one in Ireland in 1912 thought of a separatist rebellion. What was on all tongues was the possibility of physical resistance to Home Rule. The debate on the first reading went by with little reference to this contingency, but Mr. Bonar Law closed his speech on that note. He had attended the great counter-demonstration in Belfast which followed ours in Dublin and had seen in it "the expression of the soul of a people."

"These people look upon their being subject to an executive Government taken out of the Parliament in Dublin with as much horror, I believe with more horror, than the people of Poland ever regarded their being put under subjection by Russia; they say they will not submit except by force to such government. These people in Ulster are under no illusion. They know they cannot fight the British Army. But these men are ready, in what they believe to be the cause of justice and liberty, to lay down their lives."

Bloodshed, if bloodshed there was to be, was anticipated in Ulster only, and the resistance indicated at this point was purely passive. But even after the Bill had been introduced, Tories entertained the hope that a Nationalist Convention might save them trouble and reject what the Government offered. Even Mr. O'Brien, however, had given the Bill a lukewarm approval, and at this moment Redmond's prestige stood very high. When the Convention assembled, he utilized that advantage to the full. These assemblies presented a problem which might intimidate the most capable chairman. Theoretically deliberative, they had at least a representative character; all branches of the United Irish League, all branches of the Hibernians and Foresters, all county and district councils sent up their chosen men, to whom were added such clergy as chose to attend. The result was a mass of over two thousand persons packed into a single room; they deliberated in the physical conditions of a crowd; hearing was difficult, disorder only too easily brought about. I have seen one of these Conventions sharply divided in opinion, and counting of votes would have been impossible. On this day, however, there was only one opinion: the business was to manifest support and to strengthen the leader's hand, Redmond at the outset laid down the proposition that it was their "duty" as Nationalists to accept what he described as a far better Bill than Gladstone ever offered. He further indicated the need for a resolution that the question of supporting, proposing or rejecting amendments should be left to the Irish party. This was promptly carried by acclamation. All decisions were unanimous that day.

But before this or any other resolution was put to the Convention, Redmond asked the multitude there to give, what they gave most willingly, a welcome to Mr. Gladstone's grandson, who as a young member of Parliament had just voted for the Bill. The greeting which he received showed that Ireland had not forgotten what Gladstone's last years had been.

In the first of his speeches upon the Bill, Sir Edward Grey, a survivor from Gladstone's Ministry, said, as he threw a glance back over the struggle from 1886 to 1893:

"Two things stirred me at the time; they stir me still. One is Mr. Gladstone's intense grip of the fact that there was a national spirit in Ireland, and the splendour of the effort he made in his last years to acknowledge and reconcile that spirit. The other is the Irish response to Mr. Gladstone. It was not the assent of mere tacticians who had gained an advocate and a point. It was genuine, warm and living feeling, a response of gratitude and sympathy the same in kind and as living as his own."

If Redmond's task from 1912 onwards was not lightened by the existence of any such genuine, warm and living feeling for any of Mr. Asquith's Ministry, perhaps Ireland is not to blame. There was no intense grip of any fact in the Government's attitude, and on one cardinal point they were unstable as water. Sir Edward Carson, in opposing the introduction of the Bill, had used the words: "What argument is there that you can raise for giving Home Rule to Ireland that you do not equally raise for giving Home Rule to that Protestant minority in the north-east province?" Redmond, following him, made one of his few false moves in debate. "Is that the proposal? Is that the demand?" he asked. Sir Edward Carson shot the question at him: "Will you agree to it?" Seldom does the House see a practised speaker so much embarrassed; Redmond in confusion passed to another topic. He was soon to be confronted with that same line of reasoning, pushed not dialectically by an opponent, but as a step in parliamentary negotiation from the Treasury Bench. Mr. Churchill, who introduced the Second Reading, made it apparent that the demonstration in Belfast had not been wasted on him.

"Whatever Ulster's rights may be," he said, "they cannot stand in the way of the whole of the rest of Ireland. Half a province cannot impose a permanent veto on the nation. The utmost they can claim is for themselves. I ask, do they claim separate treatment for themselves? Do the counties of Down and Antrim and Londonderry, for instance, ask to be excepted from the scope of this Bill? Do they ask for a parliament of their own, or do they wish to remain here? We ought to know."

This was to proceed at once into the region of a bargain. Mr. Gladstone, with his grip on the existence of a national spirit in Ireland, would have known that concession on such point was a very different matter from some alteration in the financial terms or in the composition of the Parliament. It admitted, in fact, the contention that Ireland was not a nation but a geographical expression.

As soon as the Bill went into Committee, the result was seen. The first serious amendment proposed to exclude the four counties, Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Derry, and it was moved from the Liberal benches. Three Liberal speakers supported it in the early stages of a debate which lasted to the third day—and on the division the majority, which had been 100 for the Second Reading, fell to 69. Mr. Churchill did not vote—nor, although this was not then so apparently significant, did Mr. Lloyd George.

Thus from the very first the point of danger revealed itself. By the mere threat of a resistance which could only be overcome through the use of troops, Ulster had made the first dint for the insertion of a wedge into the composite Home Rule alliance, and into the Cabinet itself. All this had been gained without any tactical sacrifice, without even anything like a full disclosure of the force which lay behind this line of attack.

Nor was the full extent of weakness revealed. In such a case, much depended on the personality of the man who moved the amendment, and Mr. Agar-Robartes was one of the most whimsically incongruous figures in the Government ranks. Twentieth-century Liberalism wears a somewhat drab and serious aspect, but this ultra-fashionable example of gilded youth would have been in his place among the votaries of Charles James Fox. The climax of his incongruity was a vehement and rather antiquated Protestantism; he was, for instance, among the few who opposed the alteration of the Coronation oath to a formula less offensive to Catholics. Nobody doubted that his Cornish constituents would endorse whatever he did, for the House held few more popular human beings, but no one took him very seriously as a politician. This particular view of his certainly made no breach between him and his inseparable associate, Mr. Neil Primrose, who, as time went on, took as strong a line against Ulster's claims as Agar-Robartes did for them.—Sunt lacrimae rerum. I remember vividly in August 1914 the sudden apparition of this pair, side by side as always, in their familiar place below the gangway, but in quite unfamiliar guise, for khaki was still new to the benches. The two brilliant lads—for they were little more—have gone now, swept into the abyss of war's wreckage; the controversy which divided them remains, virulent as ever.

Agar-Robartes stuck to his guns and voted against the Bill henceforward; the other Liberals who supported him were ultimately brought into the Government lobby. What had really mattered was Mr. Churchill's speech on the Second Reading. Captain Pirrie, one of Redmond's few closely attached friends outside the Irish party, bound, I think, far more in affection to the Irish leader than to his own chiefs, complained angrily of the Government's evasive reticence. This brought up the Prime Minister, whose speech was brief and direct:

"This amendment proceeds on an assumption which I believe is radically false, namely, that you can split Ireland into parts. You can no more split Ireland into parts than you can split England or Scotland into parts."

When Sir Edward Carson had spoken, the Ulster leader's speech enabled Redmond to point out that Ulstermen refused to accept this proposal as a means by which Ulster might be reconciled to Home Rule, but were ready to vote for it simply as a wrecking amendment. General opinion on both sides of the House agreed that the amendment made the Bill impossible; and the majority held that therefore Ulster must give way. Ulster, on the other hand, held that therefore there must be no Home Rule Bill. But there was a Liberal element evidently not convinced that Home Rule might not be possible with Ulster excluded. Mr. Birrell admitted that the plan of segregating a portion had been considered, but had been rejected, on the merits, as unworkable. Still he professed himself open to conviction. The argument which Mr. Bonar Law decided to use was a threat. Government are saying to the people of Ulster, he said, "Convince us that you are in earnest, show us that you will fight, and we will yield to you as we have yielded to everybody else." Captain Craig, following, said that the Prime Minister anticipated that Ulster's objection would after a few years be merely a ripple on the surface. "If the right honourable gentleman has challenged this part of his Majesty's dominions to civil war, we accept the challenge."

This temper soon had ugly expression. On June 29th an excursion party of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (the Roman Catholic counterpart to the Orange Order) met with another excursion party of Protestants, mainly Sunday-school children, at a place called Castledawson. Taunts were exchanged and one of the Hibernians tried to snatch a flag from the other procession; so a disturbance began in which some of the children were hurt and many frightened. This discreditable incident was magnified with all the rancour of partisanship—as in the state of feeling must have been expected. But the reprisals were startling. All Catholics were driven out of the Belfast shipyards; many were injured, and over two thousand men were still deprived of work on July 12th, when the Unionist party held a great meeting at Blenheim. Mr. Bonar Law, facing for the first time a vast typical gathering of his supporters, said that, on a previous occasion, when speaking as little more than a private member of Parliament, he had counselled action outside constitutional limits. Now, he emphasized it that he took the same attitude as leader of the Unionist party.

"We shall use any means—whatever means seem to us to be most likely to be effective—any means to deprive them" (the Government) "of the power they have usurped and to compel them to face the people whom they have deceived. The Home Rule Bill in spite of us may go through the House of Commons. There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities. I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall not be ready to support them, and in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people."

Sir Edward Carson said on behalf of Ulster: "It will be our duty shortly to take such steps—and, indeed, they are already being taken—as will perfect our arrangements for making Home Rule absolutely impossible. We will shortly challenge the Government to interfere with us if they dare. We will do this regardless of consequences, of all personal loss and inconvenience. They may tell us, if they like, that this is treason."

Well might Mr. Bonar Law say in returning thanks that this day "would be a turning-point in their political history."

Moderate opinion was by no means glad to have reached this turning-point, and The Times rebuked Mr. Law for his violence. But, tactically, the Unionists were right: they had a Government indisposed to action and they made the most of their opportunity. Mr. Churchill again took up the conduct of the controversy, and in the recess proceeded to outline a policy which he described as federal devolution. The Prime Minister had said you could no more split Ireland into parts than England or Scotland. But Mr. Churchill argued that, in the interest of efficiency, England must be divided into provincial units with separate assemblies; that Lancashire, for instance, had on many matters a very different outlook from that of Yorkshire. He did not draw the conclusion; but it was not difficult to infer that Mr. Churchill was at least as ready to give separate rights to Ulster as to any group of English counties, and was equally ready to pitch overboard the Prime Minister's argument for refusing partition in Ireland.

In the meantime Ulster's preparations continued. It was indicated that they would bear a religious character, and the Protestant Churches were deeply involved. The proposal of a Covenant was made public in August, though the actual signing of it was deferred to "Ulster Day," September 28th. Sir Edward Carson was provided with a guard carrying swords and wooden rifles, and in one instance dummy cannon made a feature of the pageant. These things excited a good deal of derision, and the language of the Covenant was held to be only "hypothetical treason." The main words were:

"We stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland."

The Covenant in that committed the signatories to no breach of the law; it was only a pledge to refuse to recognize the authority of a Parliament not yet in being. All Ulster's proceedings might so far be dismissed, as the Attorney-General, Mr. Rufus Isaacs, dismissed them, as being "a demonstration admirably stage-managed, and led by one of great histrionic gifts." The threats of the use of force, said the Attorney-General, would not turn them aside by a hair's-breadth. Mr. Asquith, equally vigorous in his speech, was less decisive in his conclusions. Speaking at Ladybank on October 5th, he denounced "the reckless rodomontade of Blenheim, which furnishes forth the complete grammar of anarchy." But he was careful to point out that there was no demand for separate treatment for Ulster, and that Irish Unionists were simply refusing to consent to Home Rule under any conditions. He refrained from saying how a demand for separate treatment of Ulster would be dealt with if it were made.

When Parliament resumed its sittings, in a temper much heated by all the challenge and controversy of the recess, Mr. Lloyd George pushed this line of argument a shade further. He argued that Sir Edward Carson himself persisted in treating Ireland as a unit.

"Until Ulster departs from that position there is no case. Ulster has a right to claim a hearing for separate treatment; she has no right to say, 'Because we do not want Home Rule ourselves the majority of Irishmen are not to have Home Rule.'"

Yet upon the balance of events, Unionists were probably disappointed. A very strong British feeling against Sir Edward Carson and his Belfast following had been generated by the expulsion of Catholics from the shipyards and in general by the advocacy of civil war. In October 1912 several notable men who had previously counted as Unionists—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir J. West-Ridgway—all declared for Home Rule. Exasperation against the incidence of the new Insurance Act lost the Government votes at every by-election; but the Irish cause on the whole gained ground, and the chief cause of that advance was the respect universally felt for Redmond's personality and leadership. On November 22nd he attended a huge meeting of the National Liberal Federation at Nottingham along with the Prime Minister and received a wonderful welcome. The step was novel. Never since Parnell's work began had the leader of the Irish people stood on the same platform in Great Britain with the leader of any English party. It was, however, the return of a compliment, for Mr. Asquith had come to Dublin in the summer and there spoken along with the Irish leader. Moreover, a recent incident had shown how necessary it was to maintain the closest co-operation; a snap division on November 11th had inflicted defeat on the Government and occasioned loss of perhaps a fortnight's parliamentary time.

But in the very act of thus strengthening his hold on the British electorate, Redmond gave ground to those in Ireland who desired to represent him as a mere tool of the Liberal party, a pawn in Mr. Asquith's game. Foreseeing this evil did not help to combat it, and on the whole it was Redmond's inclination to take a sanguine view of his country's good sense and generosity.

The Committee stage of discussion lasted beyond the end of the year. On the finance arrangements Redmond had to face fierce opposition from Mr. O'Brien's party, which was endorsed by the Irish Council of County Councils. Here difficulties were inevitable, and attack was easy either for the Unionists, who pressed the argument that Ireland was to be started on its career of self-government with a subsidy of some two millions per annum from Great Britain, or for the O'Brienites, who urged that the country was already overtaxed in proportion to its resources, that it needed large expenditure for development, and that the possible budget indicated by the Bill left no serious possibility for reducing taxes or for undertaking even necessary expenditure. Redmond, on the other hand, was bound to conciliate the vested interests of civil servants, officials in all degrees, and the immense police force. Retrenchment on the vast area of unproductive expenditure which Castle government had created could only be hoped for at a very distant date. He could not therefore promise substantial economy; nor could he argue for a further increase of subsidy without playing into the Tories' hands. On all this detail of the measure, the attack in debate was bound to be very powerful.

So far as Great Britain was concerned, the reply of Home Rulers was tolerably effective. In 1886 it had been feasible to propose Home Rule with an Imperial contribution of two and a half millions. By 1893 the possible margin had dropped heavily, and Mr. Gladstone had foretold that within fifteen years Ireland would absorb more money for purely Irish services than Irish taxation produced. This prophecy had been fulfilled to the letter, and everyone saw that to continue the Union meant increasing this charge automatically. It was better to cut the loss and at least say that it should not exceed a fixed figure.

But in Ireland men dwelt always on the Report of the Financial Relations Commission, which had represented the balance as heavily against England and the account for overtaxation of the poorer country as reaching three hundred millions. No man quoted this document oftener than Redmond, and none was a firmer believer in its justification. But he realized, as his countrymen did not, that such a claim could never hope for cash settlement, that its value was as an argument for the concession of freedom upon generous terms. How could he urge that the terms proposed were ungenerous, when Great Britain offered to pay the cost of all Irish services—amounting to a million and a half more than Irish revenue—and to provide over and above this a yearly grant of half a million, dropping gradually, it is true, but still remaining at a subsidy of two hundred thousand a year so long as the finance arrangements of the Bill lasted?

Nevertheless, these arrangements were bad ones, and this was where the Bill was most vulnerable on its merits; for self-government without the control of taxation and expenditure is at best an unhopeful experiment.

But in the public mind at large only one difficulty bulked big, and that was Ulster. Men on both sides began to be uneasy about the consequences of what was happening, and this temper reflected itself in the House. On New Year's Day 1913, at the beginning of the Report stage, Sir Edward Carson moved the exclusion of the province of Ulster. His speech was in a new tone of studied conciliation. But, as the Prime Minister immediately made clear, there was no offer that if this concession were made opposition would cease. It was merely recommended as the sole alternative to civil war. Redmond, in following, let fall an obiter dictum on the position of the Irish controversy:

"No one who observes the current of popular opinion in this country can doubt for one instant that if this opposition from the north-east corner of Ulster did not exist, Home Rule would go through to-morrow as an agreed Bill."

For this reason, he said, he would go almost any length within certain well-defined limits to meet that section of his fellow-countrymen. His conditions were, first, that the proposal must be a genuine one, not put forward as a piece of tactics to wreck the Bill, but frankly as part of a general settlement of the Home Rule question; secondly, that it must be of reasonable character; and thirdly, not inconsistent with the fundamental principle of national self-government. Ulster's present proposal, if accepted, carried with it no promise of a settlement; it was unreasonable as proposing to strike out of Ireland five counties with Nationalist majorities. But finally, on a broader ground, it destroyed the national right of Ireland.

"Ireland for us is one entity. It is one land. Tyrone and Tyrconnell are as much a part of Ireland as Munster or Connaught. Some of the most glorious chapters connected with our national struggle have been associated with Ulster—aye, and with the Protestants of Ulster—and I declare here to-day, as a Catholic Irishman, notwithstanding all the bitterness of the past, that I am as proud of Derry as of Limerick. Our ideal in this movement is a self-governing Ireland in the future, when all her sons of all races and creeds within her shores will bring their tribute, great or small, to the great total of national enterprise, national statesmanship, and national happiness. Men may deride that ideal; they may say that it is a futile and unreliable ideal, but they cannot call it an ignoble one. It is an ideal that we, at any rate, will cling to, and because we cling to it, and because it is there, embedded in our hearts and natures, it is an absolute bar to such a proposal as this amendment makes, a proposal which would create for all times a sharp, eternal dividing line between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, and a measure which would for all time mean the partition and disintegration of our nation. To that we as Irish Nationalists can never submit."

Later in the debate, Mr. Bonar Law admitted quite frankly the argument against treating all Ulster as Unionist, and he proceeded to suggest that any county in Ulster might be given power to decide whether or not it should come into the new Parliament. It was plain, however, and Mr. Churchill made it plainer, that the Unionist leader did not speak for Ulster; Ulster's intention was still to use its own opposition to Home Rule as a bar to self-government for the whole of Ireland.

Equally was it plain that the plebiscite by counties would not be unacceptable to Mr. Churchill.

The proposal for the exclusion of the entire province was defeated by a majority of 97 and the Third Reading was carried by 110. A few days later the city of Derry returned a Home Ruler, and the Ulster representation became seventeen for the Bill and sixteen against. This dramatic change produced a considerable effect on British opinion. Redmond, speaking at a luncheon given to the winner, Mr. Hogg, indicated the lines on which he was disposed to bargain. He would be willing to give Ulster more than its proportional share of representation in the Irish Parliament.

The debate in the House of Lords was marked by certain speeches which showed that public opinion had moved considerably. Lord Dunraven declared for the Second Reading, though pressing all the line of objection to the Bill which had been taken by Mr. O'Brien and his party. He heaped scorn also as an Irishman upon "this absurd theory of two nations which is only invented to make discord where accord would naturally be." Lord MacDonnell, whose administrative experience could no more be questioned than his genius for administration, held that though amendment was needed the framework of the Bill was good, and that urgent necessity existed for the change to self-government. He alluded to the opinion expressed by Mr. Balfour in 1905, that the proper way of reforming Dublin Castle was by increasing the power of the Chief Secretary and his Under-Secretary, and thereby getting a stronger grip on the various departments of the "complicated system" prevailing. "I thought so too," said Lord MacDonnell, who in 1905 as Under-Secretary had tried his hand at this reform. "It was one of the illusions that I took with me to Ireland twenty years ago—but I am now a wiser man.... My observation of the Boards had convinced me before I left Ireland that no scheme of administrative reform which depends on bureaucratic organization for its success, or which has not behind it a popular backing, has the least chance of success in an attempt to establish in Ireland a government that is satisfactory to the Imperial Parliament or acceptable to the Irish people."—This was a repudiation of the Irish Council Bill of 1907 by its main author.

Lord Grey, a vivid and attractive personality, declared strongly for "such a measure of Home Rule as will give the Irish people power to manage their own domestic affairs." It was a conviction that had been forced upon him by his experience of Greater Britain. "Practically every American, every Canadian, every Australian is a Home Ruler." But the settlement must proceed upon federal lines; his ideal for Ireland was the provincial status of Ontario or Quebec, linked federally to a central parliament at Westminster.

The most significant speech, however, came from the Archbishop of York. Disclaiming all party allegiance, Dr. Lang claimed to express "the opinions of a very large number of fair-minded citizens." He admitted that there was an Irish problem, which could not be solved by "a policy however generous of promoting the economic welfare of Ireland." "Some measure of Home Rule is necessary not only to meet the needs of Ireland but the needs of the Imperial Parliament." This Bill, however, in his opinion, was ill-adapted to the latter purpose. It would be a block rather than a relief to the congestion of business. But these objections were "abstract and academic" in face of the real governing fact.

"The figure of Ulster, grim, determined, menacing, dominates the scene.... We may not like it. Frankly, I do not like it. It carries marks of religious and racial bitterness and suspicion. It uses language about dis-obedience to the law which must provoke disquiet and dislike in the minds of all who care for the good government of the country. I am not competent, because I have not shared in the experience of the history of the Ulster people, to decide whether or not their fears are groundless. All these things seem to me to be beside the point. If Ulster means to do what it says, then the results are certainly such as no citizen can contemplate without grave concern.... I admit, everyone must admit, that there are circumstances in which a Government is entitled and bound to run this kind of risk. At the present time I think we all feel that there is a call upon Governments to stiffen rather than to slacken their determination in the presence of threats of dis-obedience or disorder. I will go further and admit that there is one condition which would justify in my mind His Majesty's Government in running the risk of the forcible coercion of Ulster. That condition is that they should have received from the people of this country an authority, clear and explicit, to undertake that risk. It is perfectly true that the Prime Minister gave notice that if his party were returned to power they would be free to raise again the question of Home Rule, but there is a great difference between the abstract question of Home Rule and a concrete Home Rule Bill."

That speech undoubtedly represented the temper prevailing in the class of balancing electors which is so largo in England. Some of us who read it at the time recognized how far the long struggle for autonomy had prevailed, but also how strong were the forces which no argument could reach. Men like Dr. Lang might be offended, even shocked by the action of those who claimed to be England's garrison in Ireland; but they would be very slow to use force against such a section, although quite ready to justify coercion of the Irish majority. Yet what impressed Redmond was the advance made, rather than the revelation of what resistance remained. Ho had been more than thirty years an advocate of Ireland's cause; and now by the spokesman of the impartial educated mind of England the justice of that cause was admitted. The argument that a general election was necessary, or would be efficacious in solving the problem, was one with which he felt well able to contend. In that speech the Archbishop of York admitted his impression that in by-elections there had been "much more of Food Taxes and the Insurance Act than of Home Rule."

On the other hand, for Ulster such a speech had the plainest possible moral: Ulster's game was to become more grim, more determined, more menacing. The Home Rule controversy had now resolved itself into a question whether Ulster really meant business. Sir Edward Carson set himself to make that plain beyond yea or nay.

In a speech delivered in Belfast, at the opening of a new drill hall, he asked and answered the question, "Why are we drilling?" He and his colleagues did not recognize the Parliament Act, he said; a law passed under it would be only an act of usurpation, a breach of right. "We seek nothing but the elementary right implanted in every man: the right, if you are attacked, to defend yourself."

Ulster was going to stand by its Covenant.

"When we talk of force, we use it, if we are driven to use it, to beat back those who will dare to barter away those elementary rights of citizenship which we have inherited.... Go on, be ready, you are our great army. Under what circumstances you have to come into action, you must leave with us. There are matters which give us grave consideration which we cannot and ought not to talk about in public. You must trust us that we will select the most opportune methods of, if necessary, taking on ourselves the whole government of the community in which we live. I know a great deal of that will involve statutory illegality, but it will also involve much righteousness."

Some of the questions which needed grave consideration were suggested by happenings that followed hard on this speech. Much ridicule had been poured on the drillings with dummy muskets. Ulster evidently decided to push the matter a step further. A consignment of one thousand rifles with bayonets, in cases marked "electrical fittings," was seized at Belfast on June 3, 1913. Other incidents of the same nature followed. It was argued, by those who sought to represent the whole campaign as an elaborate piece of bluff, that the weapons were useless and that they were deliberately sent to be seized. A feature which scarcely bore out this view was that one consignment was addressed to the Lord-Lieutenant of an Ulster county who was also an officer in the Army. A justice of the peace, or an officer, to whom a consignment of arms had been sent for a Nationalist organization would have been ordered to clear himself in the fullest way of complicity, and even of sympathy, or he would have forfeited his commission. The noble-man involved, however, made no explanation, and was probably never officially asked to do so.

It was commonly believed in the House of Commons that at some point, if not repeatedly, Government consulted the Irish leader or his principal advisers as to whether measures of repression should be undertaken against Ulster. No such consultation took place. But the opinion prevailing among the leading Nationalists was no doubt known or inferred. Mr. Dillon, speaking on June 16, 1914, when the danger-point had been clearly reached, justified the previous abstinence from coercion.

"I have held the view from the beginning that it would not have been wise policy for a Government engaged in the great work of the political emancipation of a nation to embark on a career of coercion. I knew, and knew well, all the difficulties and all the reproaches that the Government would have to face if they abstained from coercion. It is a difficult and almost unprecedented course for a Government to take, and it is, as the Chief Secretary said, a courageous one. But with all its difficulties and dangers it is the right course. We who have been through the mill know what the effect of coercion is. We know that you do not put down Irishmen by coercion. You simply embitter them and stiffen their backs."

It is therefore unquestionable that the decision to do nothing had Redmond's approval. Whatever may be thought of that policy, one factor was assuredly underestimated—the effect produced on the public mind by the spectacle of highly placed personages defying the law and defying it with impunity. It was possible to argue that a conviction for hypothetical treason would be difficult to secure and that failure in a prosecution would only encourage lawless conduct. But Privy Councillors who made preparations for prospective rebellion and remained Privy Councillors were a new phenomenon. The public thought, and it was apparent that the public would think, that Government was afraid to quarrel with what is called Society. Society shared that belief and began to extend its influence in a new direction. No Government can permit itself to be defied without general relaxation of discipline, and the effects extended themselves to the Army. At a meeting on July 12th in Ulster a telegram was read out from "Covenanters" in an Ulster regiment, urging "No surrender until ammunition is spent and the last drop of blood." In his speech on that occasion Sir Edward Carson declared that every day brought him at least half a dozen letters from British officers asking to be enrolled among the future defenders of Ulster. One officer, he said, having signed the Covenant, was ordered to send in his papers and resign his commission. The officer refused to do so, and after a short time was simply told to resume his duty.

"We have assurance from the Prime Minister," said Sir Edward Carson, "that the forces of the Crown are not to be used against Ulster. Government know that they could not rely on the Army to shoot down the people of Ulster."

Later events in Ireland furnished a grim commentary as to what the Army would be willing, and would not be willing, to do in the way of shooting down in Ireland; and such words as these of Sir Edward Carson were destined to be among the chief difficulties which Redmond had to encounter when he sought to lead Ireland into the war.

At the meeting of that day, delegates were present from a British League to assist Ulster in her resistance. Behind this new quasi-military organization stood now the whole of one great party. Sir Edward Carson transmitted a message from Mr. Bonar Law in these words:

"Whatever steps we may feel compelled to take, whether they be constitutional, or in the long run whether they be unconstitutional, we will have the whole of the Unionist party under his leadership behind us."

Later in the autumn, on the first anniversary of Ulster Day, there was formally announced the formation of an Ulster Provisional Government, with a Military Committee attached to it. A guarantee fund to indemnify all who might be involved in damaging consequences was set on foot, and a million sterling was indicated as the necessary amount to be obtained.

In the meantime signs of distress came from the Liberal camp. Mr. Churchill, in speeches to his constituents, renewed the suggestions for partition. More notable was a letter from Lord Loreburn, who had till recently been Lord Chancellor, and who was known as a steady and outspoken Home Ruler. He appealed in The Times of September 11, 1913, for a conference between parties on the Irish difficulty. Irish Nationalist opinion grew profoundly uneasy, and Redmond at Limerick on October 12th set out his position with weighty emphasis. He referred to the fact that during the summer he himself, assisted by Mr. Devlin, had followed Sir Edward Carson and other Ulster speakers from place to place through Great Britain, and on the same ground had stated the case for Home Rule. He claimed, and with justice, a triumphant success for this counter-campaign.

"The argumentative opposition to Home Rule is dead, and all the violent language, all the extravagant action, all the bombastic threats, are but indications that the battle is over."

Still, he was too old a politician, he said, not to build a bridge of gold to convenience his opponents' retreat, provided that the fruits of victory were not flung away. Mr. Churchill had told the Ulstermen that there was no demand they could make which would not be matched, and more than matched, by their countrymen and the Liberal party. On this it was necessary to be explicit.

"Irish Nationalists can never be assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation; Ireland is a unit. It is true that within the bosom of a nation there is room for diversities of the treatment of government and of administration, but a unit Ireland is and Ireland must remain.... The two-nation theory is to us an abomination and a blasphemy."

These were carefully chosen words, and they indicated a possible acceptance of the proposal that Ulster should have control of its own administration in regard to local affairs, but that Irish legislation should be left to a common parliament.

This plan Sir Edward Grey described as his "personal contribution" to a discussion of possibilities which had been inaugurated by a notable speech from the Prime Minister. At Ladybank, on October 25th, Mr. Asquith invited "interchange of views and suggestions, free, frank, and without prejudice." Nothing, however, could be accepted which did not conform to three governing considerations. First, there must be established "a subordinate Irish legislature with an executive responsible to it"; secondly, "nothing must be done to erect a permanent and insuperable bar to Irish unity"; and thirdly, though the process of relieving congestion in the Imperial Parliament could not be fully accomplished by the present Bill, Ireland must not be made to wait till a complete scheme of decentralization could be carried out.

The second of these conditions was plainly the most significant. It was taken to mean that "county option"—the right for each county to decide whether it would come under a Home Rule Government—would not create "a permanent and insuperable" obstacle, since each county could be given the opportunity to vote itself in at any time. Redmond's next important speech in England showed by its emphasis that he felt a danger. He denounced "the gigantic game of bluff and black-mail" which was in progress. The proposed exclusion of Ulster was not a proposition that could be considered. It would bring about, he thought, the ruin of Ulster's prosperity. "For us it would mean the nullification of our hopes and aspirations for the future." It would stereotype an old evil in the region where it still existed. What Ulster really feared, he said, was the loss, not of freedom or prosperity, but of Protestant ascendancy.

This was the truth; Protestant ascendancy, which in his boyhood had existed throughout all Ireland, was in consequence of the Irish party's work dead in three provinces. It remained and must remain in Ulster, where Protestants were a majority, but it would be qualified if that region came under the control of a parliament elected by all Ireland. That was and is the true reason of Ulster's resistance to national self-government. What he would concede and what he would reject, Redmond indicated in general words: "There is no demand, however extravagant and unreasonable it may appear to us, that we are not ready carefully to consider, so long as it is consistent with the principle for which generations of our race have battled, the principle of a settlement based on the national self-government of Ireland. I shut no door to a settlement by consent, but ... we will not be intimidated or bullied into a betrayal' of our trust."

It was noted at that time that he had said nothing to rule out Sir Edward Grey's proposal, which would have left the local majority predominant in Ulster's own affairs; and on December 4th Sir Edward Grey spoke again, showing a firmness that was the more impressive because of his habitual moderation of tone. One thing, he said, was worse than carrying Home Rule by force, and that would be the abandonment of Home Rule. Two suggestions had been made—a proposal for the temporary exclusion of Ulster and a plan for giving to Ulster administrative autonomy. Neither had been received by Ulster "in a spirit which seemed likely to lead to a settlement.... Was it a settlement by consent they wanted, or was their aim simply the destruction of the Bill?"

This emphasized what Redmond had said a few days earlier at Birmingham, when he declared that the fight against Home Rule was not an honest one, that its real purpose was to defeat the Parliament Act and restore to the Tory party its special control over the legislative machine.

The facts were plain on the surface. The Tories clamoured for a fresh general election, urging that the electors never realized that the Liberal programme involved civil war. But to concede this claim indirectly defeated the Parliament Act, which would then have broken down at the first attempt to apply it. What added to the insincerity of the argument was Ulster's repeated refusal to be influenced by the result of any election. Under no circumstances, speaker after speaker from Ulster declared, would they submit to Home Rule. The prospect of civil war remained, with only one limitation. Mr. Bonar Law undertook that if a general election took place and the Liberals again came back, the British Unionist party would not support Ulster in physical resistance. They would, however, continue to oppose a Home Rule Bill by all constitutional means.

Nevertheless, the English disposition to compromise was already operating. Mr. Asquith was the last of mankind to make a quixotic stand for principle, and the most disposed to pride himself on a practical recognition of realities. His Government was in rough water. During the summer Mr. Lloyd George's transaction in Marconi shares had been magnified by partisan rancour into a crime. Much more serious was the split with Labour, which led to the loss of seat after seat at by-elections, when the allied forces which stood behind the Parliament Act attacked each other and let the Tories in. The Women's Franchise agitation was also coming to its stormiest point.

Redmond's part was one of extraordinary difficulty. The cause for which he stood was one affecting the interests of only a small minority of the total electorate concerned in the struggle which now spread over both islands. The Irish problem belonged in reality to the Victorian era; those in the British electorate whom it could stir to enthusiasm were stirred by a memory, not by a new gospel. Normally, but for the chance of Parnell's overthrow, it would have been solved in Gladstone's last years. For most Liberals, for all Labour men, the fact that it had passed beyond the sphere of argument meant a lack of driving force. It was a part of accepted Liberal orthodoxy; minds were centred rather on those social controversies in which Mr. Lloyd George was the dominant figure, and upon which opinion had not yet crystallized.

Further, the cry of Protestant liberties in danger, the cause of Protestants who conducted their arming to the accompaniment of hymns and prayer, made inevitably a searching appeal to the feelings of an island kingdom where the prejudice against Roman Catholics is more instinctive than anywhere else in the world. Looking back on it all, I marvel not at the difficulties we encountered, but at the success with which we surmounted them; and the great element in that success was Redmond's personality. His dignity, his noble eloquence, his sincerity, and the large, tolerant nature of the man, won upon the public imagination. His tact was unfailing. In all those years, under the most envenomed scrutiny, he never let slip a word that could be used to our disadvantage. This is merely a negative statement. It is truer to say that he never touched the question without raising it to the scope of great issues. Nothing petty, nothing personal came into his discourse; he so carried the national claim of Ireland that men saw in it at once the test and the justification of democracy.

That is why the Irish cause, instead of being a millstone round the neck of the parliamentary alliance, was in truth a living cohesive force. But in order to keep it so it must be pleaded, not as a question for Ireland only but for the democracy of Great Britain and, in a still larger sense, for the Commonwealth of the British Empire.

Liberal statesmen in their desire to simplify their own task underestimated altogether the difficulty which their professed short-cuts to the goal—or rather, their attempted circuits round obstacles—created inevitably for the Irish leader. They did not realize that his genuine feeling—based on knowledge—for the British democracy at home, and still more for its offshoots overseas, was unshared by his countrymen, still aloof, still suspicious, and daily impressed by the spectacle of those who most paraded allegiance to British Imperialism professing a readiness to tear up the Constitution rather than allow freedom to Ireland. Liberal statesmen did not understand that Redmond could only justify to Ireland the part which he was taking if he won, and that he and not they must be the judge of what Ireland would consider a defeat. In all probability, also, they overrated his power and that of the party which he led. They did not guess at the potency of new forces which only in these months began to make themselves felt, and which in the end, breaking loose from Redmond's control, undid his work. A new phase in Irish history had begun, of which Sir Edward Carson was the chief responsible author.



CHAPTER IV

THE RIVAL VOLUNTEER FORCES

The first stir of a new movement in Nationalist Ireland outside the old political lines came from Labour—from Irish Labour, as yet unorganized and terribly in need of organization. On August 26, 1913, a strike in Dublin began under the leadership of Mr. Larkin. It had all the violence and disorder which is characteristic of economic struggles where Labour has not yet learned to develop its strength; it opened new cleavages at this moment when national union was most necessary: it was fought with the passion of despair by workers whose scale of pay and living was a disgrace to civilization; and after five months it was not settled but scotched, leaving dark embers of revolutionary hate scattered through the capital of Ireland.

One incident showed some of the consequences ready to spring, even in England itself, from the action taken in Ulster. Mr. Larkin at the end of October 1913 was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for sedition and inciting to disturbance. A fierce outcry ran through the Labour world in Great Britain; by-elections were in progress, and Government was angrily challenged with having one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for Labour and another for the Unionist party. To this pressure Government yielded, and Mr. Larkin was liberated after a few days in jail.

But in Ireland more formidable symptoms soon made themselves manifest. Captain J.R. White, son of Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith, was a soldier by hereditary instinct and had won the Distinguished Service Order in South Africa. But some strain in his composition answered to other calls, and upon Tolstoyan grounds he ceased to be a soldier, without ceasing to be a natural leader of men. His first public appearance was at a meeting in London in support of Home Rule addressed by a number of prominent persons who were not Roman Catholics. But his interests were plainly not so much Nationalist as broadly humanitarian; freedom for the individual soul rather than for the nation was his object: and he suddenly enrolled himself among Mr. Larkin's allies. His proposal was outlined to a great assembly of the strikers gathered in front of Liberty Hall: Mr. Larkin set it out. They must no longer be "content to assemble in hopeless haphazard crowds" but must "agree to bring themselves under the influences of an ordered and sympathetic discipline." "Labour in its own defence must begin to train itself to act with disciplined courage and with organized and concentrated force. How could they accomplish this? By taking a leaf out of the book of Carson. If Carson had permission to train his braves of the North to fight against the aspirations of the Irish people, then it was legitimate and fair for Labour to organize in the same militant way to preserve their rights and to ensure that if they were attacked they would be able to give a very satisfactory account of themselves."

Thus began in a small sectional manner a national movement which led far indeed. Mr. O'Cathasaigh, from whose Story of the Irish Citizen Army I quote, attributes the failure of that purely Labour organization chiefly to the establishment of the Irish Volunteers.

This was a development which Redmond on his part neither willed nor approved, yet one which in the circumstances was inevitable. Who could suppose that the formation of combatant forces would remain a monopoly of any party? There was no mistaking the weight which a hundred thousand Ulster Volunteers, drilled and regimented, threw into Sir Edward Carson's advocacy. As early as September 1913, during the parliamentary recess, Redmond received at least one letter—and possibly he received many—urging him to raise the standard of a similar force, and pointing out that if he did not take this course it might be taken by others less fit to guide it. The letter of which I speak elicited no answer. It was never his habit to reply to inconvenient communications—a policy which he inherited from Parnell, who held that nearly every letter answered itself within six months, if it were let alone. Certainly in this case it so happened. Long before six months were up, facts had made argument superfluous.

Wisdom is easy after the event, and few would dispute now that the constitutional party ought either to have dissociated itself completely from the appeal to force, or to have launched and controlled it from the outset. Neither of these lines was followed, and the responsibility for what was done and what was not done must lie with Redmond. Yet, as I read it, the key to his policy lay in a dread, not of war, but of civil war. To arm Irishmen against each other was of all possible courses to him the most hateful. It opened a vision of fratricidal strife, of an Ireland divided against itself by new and bloody memories.

Moreover, though he had, as the world came to know, soldiering in his blood—though the call to war, when he counted the war righteous, stirred what was deepest in him—by training and conviction he was essentially a constitutionalist: he realized profoundly how strong were the forces behind constitutionalism in Great Britain, how impregnable was the position of British Ministers if they boldly asserted the law with equality as between man and man. Where he was mistaken was in his estimate of the Government with which he had to deal, and especially of Mr. Asquith. Speaking to his constituents early in the New Year of 1914 he said, "The Prime Minister is as firm as a rock, and is, I believe, the strongest and sanest man who has appeared in British politics in our time." The verdict of history might have borne out this judgment had Mr. Asquith never been forced to face extraordinary times. In the event, it was Mr. Asquith's lack of firmness and failure in strength which drove Redmond into belated acceptance of a policy modelled on Sir Edward Carson's.

As early as July 1913 the demonstrations in Ulster led to discussion of a countermove among young men in Dublin. But there was no public proposal, until at the end of October Professor MacNeill, Vice-President of the Gaelic League, published an article in the League's official organ calling on Nationalist Ireland to drill and arm. The first meeting of a provisional committee followed a few days later. Support was asked from all sections of Nationalist opinion; but, as a whole, members of the United Irish League and of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who constituted the bulk of Redmond's following, refused to act. Still, about a third of the committee were supporters of the parliamentary party; they included Professor Kettle, who was from 1906 to 1910 among its most brilliant members. It was, however, significant that the Lord Mayor, a prominent official Nationalist, refused the use of the Mansion House for a meeting at which it was proposed to start the enrolment of Irish Volunteers. As a result, the venue was changed to the Rotunda, and so great enthusiasm was shown that the Rink was used for the assembly. Even that did not suffice for half the gathering. Three overflow meetings were held, and four thousand men are said to have been enrolled that evening.

Yet the movement did not spread at once with rapidity. By the end of December recruits only amounted to ten thousand. For this two causes were answerable. The first was the honourable refusal of the committee to allow companies to be enrolled except according to locality. They would have no sectional companies of Sinn Fein volunteers, of United Irish League Volunteers, of Hibernian Volunteers. All must mix equally in the ranks. The second was the fear of most Nationalists that by joining an organization with which the national leader was not identified they might weaken his hand. This operated, although the declared intention of the organization was to strengthen Redmond's position. At Limerick in January Pearse said: "In the Volunteer movement we are going to give Mr. Redmond a weapon which will enable him to enforce the demand for Home Rule."

Briefly, for several months the numbers of the new force did not show that the whole of Nationalist Ireland was in support of it. Ireland was waiting for a sign from Redmond, and it did not come. The events which literally drove Irish constitutional Nationalists into following Ulster's example had still to occur.

There was, however, a wide extension of the cadres of the organization, and it was being spread by men some of whom—like Professor MacNeill—dissented from Redmond's attitude of quiescence, while some were general opponents of the whole constitutional policy. They covered the country with committees, recruited, it is true, from all sections of Nationalist Ireland. But it was inevitable that the element who distrusted Redmond, and whose distrust he reciprocated, should attain an influence out of all proportion to its following in the country.

Government's action—and this sentence will run like a refrain through the rest of this book—contributed largely to strengthen the extremists and to weaken Redmond's hold on the people. During eleven months the Ulster Volunteers had been drilling, had been importing arms, and no step was taken to interfere. Within ten days after the Irish Volunteer Force began to be enrolled, a proclamation (issued on December 4, 1913) prohibited the importation of military arms and ammunition into Ireland. A system of search was instituted. But the Ulstermen were already well supplied. Redmond was blamed for not forcing the withdrawal of the proclamation. He controlled the House of Commons, it was said. This was the line of argument constantly taken by dissentient Nationalists; and it was true that he could at any moment put the Government out. Critics did not stop to ask for whose advantage that would be. Government by issuing this proclamation had effected no good: they had embarrassed their chief ally, and they had laid the foundation for an imposing structure of incidents which grew with pernicious rapidity into a monumental proof that law, even under a Liberal administration, has one aspect for Protestant Ulster and quite another for the rest of Ireland.

But in England at the beginning of the fateful year 1914 the Irish Volunteers had not yet become recognized as a factor in the main political situation. An attitude of mind had been studiously fostered which found crude expression soon after the House met. One of the Liberal party was arguing that Ulster had made Home Rule an absolute necessity, because Nationalists would have "fourfold justification if they resisted in the way you have taught them to resist the Government of this country in maintaining the old system." "They have not the pluck," interjected Captain Craig, the most prominent of the Ulster members. The present Lord Chancellor, Mr. F.E. Smith, was voluble in declarations that Nationalists would "neither fight for Home Rule nor pay for Home Rule." These taunts did not ease Redmond's position, especially as it became plain that Ulster's threat of violence had succeeded.

Mr. Asquith, referring to the "conversations" between leaders which had taken place during the winter, said that since no definite agreement had been reached the Government had decided to reopen the matter in the House. This meant, as Redmond pointed out with some asperity, that the Prime Minister had accepted responsibility for taking the initiative in making proposals to meet objections whose reasonableness he did not admit. The Opposition, he thought, should have been left to put forward some plan.

Yet Redmond's attitude, and the attitude of the House, was considerably affected by an unusual speech which had been delivered by the Ulster leader.

Sir Edward Carson, as everyone knows, is not an Ulsterman, and the chief of many advantages which Ulster gained from his advocacy was that Ulster's case was never stated to Great Britain as Ulstermen themselves would have stated it. It is not true to say that Ulstermen by habit think of Ireland as consisting of two nations, for all Ulstermen traditionally regard themselves as Irish and so have always described themselves without qualification. But it is true to say that Ulster Protestants have regarded Irish Catholics as a separate and inferior caste of Irishmen. The belief has been ingrained into them that as Protestants they are morally and intellectually superior to those of the other religion. Their whole political attitude is determined by this conviction. They refuse to come under a Dublin Parliament because in it they would be governed by a majority whom they regard as their inferiors. It is in their deliberate view natural that Roman Catholics should submit to be controlled by Protestants, unnatural that Protestants should submit to be controlled by Roman Catholics.

It does not express the truth to say that Sir Edward Carson was adroit enough to avoid putting this view of the case to the electors of Great Britain or to the House of Commons. Temperamentally and instinctively, he did not share it. He was a Southern Irishman who at the opening of his life held himself, as not one Ulsterman in a thousand does, perfectly free to make up his mind for or against the maintenance of the Union. He reached the conclusion not only that Home Rule would be disastrous for Ireland, for the United Kingdom, and for the British Empire, but that it would mean for Irishmen the acceptance of an inferior status in the Empire. As citizens of the United Kingdom, he held, they were more honourably situated than they could be as citizens of an Irish State within the Empire. This was an attitude of mind which Ulster could endorse, although it did not fully represent Ulster's conviction: but this was the case which Sir Edward Carson always made on behalf of Ulster, and he made it as an Irishman whose personal interests and connections lay in the South of Ireland, not in the North. His argument was the more persuasive because it was based on a view of Ireland's true interest—not of Ulster's only; and it was the harder on that account for Redmond to repel peremptorily. More than this, between him and Redmond there was an old personal tie. The Irish Bar is a true centre of intercourse between men of varying political and religious beliefs, and as junior barristers Edward Carson and John Redmond went the Munster circuit together.

All this lay behind the appeal which on February 11, 1914, was implied rather than expressed in the novel phrase and still more unaccustomed tone of a consummate orator.

"Believe me," Sir Edward Carson said, "whatever way you settle the Irish question" (and that phrase threw over the cry of "No Home Rule"), "there are only two ways to deal with Ulster. It is for statesmen to say which is the best and right one. She is not a part of the community which can be bought. She will not allow herself to be sold. You must therefore either coerce her if you go on, or you must in the long run, by showing that good government can come under the Home Rule Bill, try and win her over to the case of the rest of Ireland. You probably can coerce her—though I doubt it. If you do, what will be the disastrous consequences not only to Ulster, but to this country and the Empire? Will my fellow-countryman"—and at this emphatic word, which jettisoned absolutely the theory of two nations, the speaker turned to his left, where Redmond sat in his accustomed place below the gangway—"will my fellow-countryman, the leader of the Nationalist Party, have gained anything? I will agree with him—I do not believe he wants to triumph any more than I do. But will he have gained anything if he takes over these people and then applies for what he used to call—at all events his party used to call—the enemies of the people to come in and coerce them into obedience? No, sir; one false step taken in relation to Ulster will, in my opinion, render for ever impossible a solution of the Irish question. I say this to my Nationalist fellow-countrymen, and, indeed, also to the Government: you have never tried to win over Ulster. You have never tried to understand her position. You have never alleged, and can never allege, that this Bill gives her one atom of advantage."

Then, carried away by the course of his argument, an angry note came into his voice, and before a minute had passed we were back in the old atmosphere. He accused us of wanting "not Ulster's affections but her taxes."

Well might Redmond say when he rose that Sir Edward Carson had been heard by all of us with very mixed feelings. "I care not about the assent of Englishmen," he said; "I am fighting this matter out between a fellow-countryman and myself, and I say that it was an unworthy thing for him to say that I am animated by these base motives, especially after he had lectured the House on the undesirability of imputing motives."

On the personal note Redmond was to the full as effective as his opponent, and his speech of that day was memorable. It was also very much more to the taste of the Liberal rank and file than what came from their own front bench. "We do not by any means take the tragic view of the probabilities or even the possibilities of what is called civil war in Ulster," he said; and added that the House of Commons ought, in his opinion, "to resent as an affront these threats of civil war." Yet in the end he promised, for the sake of peace, "consideration in the friendliest spirit" (not very different from acceptance) of any proposals that the Government might feel called upon to put forward.