for a great principle and a great ideal,” and if their determination to resist was not morally justified he “did not see how resistance could ever be justified in history at all.”  But if the exclusion of Ulster was to be offered, he would immediately go to Belfast and lay the proposal before his followers.  He did not intend “that Ulster should be a pawn in any political game,” and would not allow himself to be manoeuvred into a position where it could afterwards be said that Ulster had resorted to arms to secure something that had been rejected when offered by legislation.  The sympathy of Ulstermen with Loyalists in other parts of Ireland was as deep and sincere as ever, but no one had ever supposed that Ulster could by force of arms do more than preserve her own territory from subjection to Dublin.  As for the Nationalists, they would never succeed in coercing Ulster, but “by showing that good government can come under Home Rule they might try and win her over to the case of the rest of Ireland.”  That was a plan that had never yet been tried.

The significance of the announcement which Mr. Asquith had now made lay in the fact that it was an acknowledgment by the Government for the first time that there was an “Ulster Question” to be dealt with—­that Ulster was not, as had hitherto been the Liberal theory, like any other minority who must submit to the will of the majority opposed to it, but a distinct community, conditioned by special circumstances entitling it to special treatment.  The Prime Minister had thus, as Mr. Bonar Law insisted, “destroyed utterly the whole foundation on which for the last two years the treatment extended to Ulster in this Bill has been justified.”  From that day it became impossible ever again to contend that Ulster was merely a recalcitrant minority in a larger unity, without rights of her own.

The speeches of the Unionist leaders in the House of Commons showed clearly enough how little faith they had that the Government intended to do anything that could lead to an agreed settlement.  The interval that passed before the nature of the Government’s proposals was made known increased rather than diminished this distrust.  The air was full of suggestions, the most notable of which was put forward by the veteran constitutional lawyer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, who proposed that Ulster should be governed by a separate committee elected by its own constituencies, with full legislative, administrative, and financial powers, subject only to the Crown and the Imperial Parliament.[61] Unionists did not believe that the Liberal Cabinet would be allowed by their Nationalist masters to offer anything so liberal to Ulster; nor did that Province desire autonomy for itself.  They believed that the chief desire of the Government was not to appease Ulster, but to put her in a tactically indefensible position.  This fear had been expressed by Lord Lansdowne as long before as the previous October, when he wrote privately to Carson in reference to Lord Loreburn’s