“Because I had no desire to show a dissentient Ireland to the Germans.  I am glad, even with what has happened, that we played the game, and if we had to do it again we would play the game.  And then suddenly came the rebellion in Dublin.  I cannot find words to describe my own horror when I heard of it.  For I am bound to admit to you that I was not thinking merely of Ulster; I was thinking of the war; I was thinking, as I am always thinking, of what will happen if we are beaten in the war.  I was thinking of the sacrifice of human lives at the front, and in Gallipoli, and at Kut, when suddenly I heard that the whole thing was interrupted by, forsooth, an Irish rebellion—­by what Mr. Dillon in the House of Commons called a clean fight!  It is not Ulster or Ireland that is now at stake:  it is the British Empire.  We have therefore to consider not merely a local problem, but a great Imperial problem—­how to win the war.”

He then outlined the representations that had been made to him by the Cabinet as to the injury to the Allied cause resulting from the unsettled Irish question—­the disturbance of good relations with the United States, whence we were obtaining vast quantities of munitions; the bad effect of our local differences on opinion in Allied and neutral countries.  He admitted that these evil effects were largely due to false and hostile propaganda to which the British Government weakly neglected to provide an antidote; he believed they were grossly exaggerated.  But in time of war they could not contend with their own Government nor be deaf to its appeals, especially when that Government contained all their own party leaders, on whose support they had hitherto leaned.

One of Carson’s chief difficulties was to make men grasp the significance of the fact that Home Rule was now actually established by Act of Parliament.  The point that the Act was on the Statute-book was constantly lost sight of, with all that it implied.  He drove home the unwelcome truth that simple repeal of that Act was not practical politics.  The only hope for Ulster to escape going under a Parliament in Dublin lay in the promised Amending Bill.  But they had no assurance how much that Bill, when produced, would do for them.  Was it likely, he asked, to do more than was now offered by the Government?

He then told the Council what Mr. Lloyd George’s proposals were.  The Cabinet offered on the one hand a “clean cut,” not indeed of the whole of Ulster, but of the six most Protestant counties, and on the other to bring the Home Rule Act, so modified, into immediate operation.  He pointed out that none of them could contemplate using the U.V.F. for fighting purposes at home after the war; and that, even if such a thing were thinkable, they could not expect to get more by forcible resistance to the Act than what was now offered by legislation.