Public attention was, however, not allowed to concentrate wholly on Ireland.  The Radicals, instigated by Sir John Brunner, President of the National Liberal Federation, were doing their best to prevent the strengthening of the Navy, the time being opportune for parsimony in Mr. Lloyd George’s opinion because our relations with Germany were “far more friendly than for years past."[60] The militant women suffragists were carrying on a lively campaign of arson and assault all over the country.  Labour unrest was in a condition of ferment.  Land agitation was exciting the “single-taxers” and other fanatics; and the Tariff question had not ceased to be a cause of division in the Unionist Party.  But, while these matters were sharing with the Irish problem the attention of the Press and the public, “conversations” were being held behind the scenes with a view to averting what everyone now agreed would be a dangerous crisis if Ulster proved implacable.

When Parliament met on the 10th of February, 1914, Mr. Asquith referred to these conversations; but while he congratulated everyone concerned on the fact that the Press had been successfully kept in the dark for months regarding them, he had to admit that they had produced no result.  But there were, he said, “schemes and suggestions of settlement in the air,” among them the exclusion of Ulster from the Bill, a proposal on which he would not at that moment “pronounce, or attempt to pronounce, any final judgment”, and he then announced that, as soon as the financial business of the year was disposed of, he would bring forward proposals for the purpose of arriving at an agreement “which will consult not only the interests but the susceptibilities of all concerned.”

This appeared to be a notable change of attitude on the part of the Government; but it was received with not a little suspicion by the Unionist leaders.  Whether or not the change was due, as Mr. William Moore bluntly asserted, to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which had now reached its full strength of 100,000 men, the question of interest was whether the promised proposals would render that force unnecessary.  Mr. Austen Chamberlain asked why the Government’s proposals should be kept bottled up until a date suspiciously near All Fools’ Day; and Sir Edward Carson, in one of the most impressive speeches he ever made in Parliament, which wrung from Mr. Lloyd George the acknowledgment that it had “entranced the House,” joined Chamberlain in demanding that the country should not be kept in anxious suspense.  The only proper way of making the proposals known was, he said, by embodying them at once in a Bill to amend the Home Rule Bill.  He confirmed Chamberlain’s statement that nothing short of the exclusion of Ulster would be of the slightest use.  The Covenanters were not men who would have acted as they had done for the sake of minor details that could be adjusted by “paper safeguards,” they were “fighting