which he tried to do the work of half a dozen men, brought about a complete breakdown of health some months later, with the result that, to his deep disappointment, he was forbidden to go with the Division to France.  No one displayed a finer spirit than his brother, Mr. Charles Craig, M.P. for South Antrim.  He had never done any soldiering, as his brother had in South Africa, and he was over military age in 1914; but he did not allow either his age, his military inexperience, or his membership of the House of Commons to serve as excuse for separating himself from the men with whom he had learnt the elements of drill in the U.V.F.  He obtained a commission as Captain in the Ulster Division, and went with it to France, where he was wounded and taken prisoner in the great engagement at Thiepval in the battle of the Somme, and had to endure all the rigours of captivity in Germany till the end of the war.  There was afterwards not a little pungent comment among his friends on the fact that, when honours were descending in showers on the heads of the just and the unjust alike, a full share of which reached members of Parliament, sometimes for no very conspicuous merit, no recognition of any kind was awarded to this gallant Ulster officer, who had set so fine an example and unostentatiously done so much more than his duty.

The Government’s act of treachery in regard to “controversial business” was consummated on the 18th of September, when the Home Rule Bill received the Royal Assent.  On the 15th Mr. Asquith put forward his defence in the House of Commons.  In a sentence of mellifluous optimism that was to be woefully falsified in a not-distant future, he declared his confidence that the action his Ministry was taking would bring “for the first time for a hundred years Irish opinion, Irish sentiment, Irish loyalty, flowing with a strong and a continuous and ever-increasing stream into the great reservoir of Imperial resources and Imperial unity.”  He acknowledged, however, that the Government had pledged itself not to put the Home Rule Bill on the Statute-book until the Amending Bill had been disposed of.  That promise was not now to be kept; instead he gave another, which, when the time came, was equally violated, namely, to introduce the Amending Bill “in the next session of Parliament, before the Irish Government Bill can possibly come into operation.”  Meantime, there was to be a Suspensory Bill to provide that the Home Rule Bill should remain in abeyance till the end of the war, and he gave an assurance “which would be in spirit and in substance completely fulfilled, that the Home Rule Bill will not and cannot come into operation until Parliament has had the fullest opportunity, by an Amending Bill, of altering, modifying, or qualifying its provisions in such a way as to secure the general consent both of Ireland and of the United Kingdom.”  The Prime Minister, further, paid a tribute to “the patriotic and public spirit which had been shown by the Ulster Volunteers,” whose conduct has made “the employment of force, any kind of force, for what you call the coercion of Ulster, an absolutely unthinkable thing.”