Carson, however, did not remain very long in the Government.  Disapproving of the policy pursued in relation to our Allies in the Balkans, he resigned on the 20th of October, 1915.  But he had remained long enough to prove his value in council to the most energetic of his colleagues in the Cabinet.  Men like Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lloyd George, although they had been the bitterest of Carson’s opponents eighteen months previously, seldom omitted from this time forward to seek his advice in times of difficulty; and the latter of these two, when things were going badly with the Allies more than a year later, endeavoured to persuade Mr. Asquith to include Carson in a Committee of four to be charged with the entire conduct of the war.

It was, perhaps, fortunate that the Ulster leader was not a member of the Government when the rebellion broke out in the South of Ireland at Easter 1916.  For this event suddenly brought to the front again the whole Home Rule question, which everybody had hoped might be allowed to sleep till the end of the war; and it would have been a misfortune if Carson had not then been in a position of independence to play his part in this new act of the Irish drama.

The Government had many warnings of what was brewing.  But Mr. Birrell, the Chief Secretary, who in frivolity seemed a contemporary embodiment of Nero, deemed cheap wit a sufficient reply to all remonstrances, and had to confess afterwards that he had utterly miscalculated the forces with which he had to deal.  He was completely taken by surprise when, on the 20th of April, an attempt to land weapons from a German vessel, escorted by a submarine from which Sir Roger Casement landed in the West of Ireland, proved that the Irish rebels were in league with the enemy; and even after this ominous event, he did nothing to provide against the outbreak that occurred in Dublin four days later.  The rising in the capital, and in several other places in the South of Ireland, was not got under for a week, during which time more than 170 houses had been burnt, L2,000,000 sterling worth of property destroyed or damaged, and 1,315 casualties had been suffered, of which 304 were fatal.

The aims of the insurgents were disclosed in a proclamation which referred to the administration in Ireland as a “long usurpation by a foreign people and government.”  It declared that the Irish Republican Brotherhood—­the same organisation that planned and carried out the Phoenix Park murders in 1882—­had now seized the right moment for “reviving the old traditions of Irish nationhood,” and announced that the new Irish Republic was a sovereign independent State, which was entitled to claim the allegiance of every Irish man and woman.