His advice now was that the Agar-Robartes amendment should be supported; and, although some of those present required a good deal of persuasion, it was ultimately decided unanimously that this course should be followed.  The wisdom of the decision was never afterwards questioned, and, indeed, was abundantly confirmed by subsequent events.

Mr. Agar-Robartes moved his amendment the same afternoon, summarising his argument in the dictum, denied by Mr. William Redmond, that “Orange bitters will not mix with Irish whisky.”  The debate, which lasted three days, was the most important that took place in committee on the Bill, for in the course of it the whole Ulster question was exhaustively discussed.  Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Churchill had thrown out hints in the second reading debate that the Government might do something to meet the Ulster case.  The Prime Minister was now pressed to say what these hints meant.  Had the Government any policy in regard to Ulster?  Had they considered how they could deal with the threatened resistance?  Mr. Bonar Law told the Government that they must know that, if they employed troops to coerce the Ulster Loyalists, Ministers who gave the order “would run a greater risk of being lynched in London than the Loyalists of Ulster would run of being shot in Belfast.”  Every argument in favour of Home Rule was, he said, equally cogent against subjecting Ulster to Home Rule contrary to her own desire.  If the South of Ireland objected to being governed from Westminster, the North of Ireland quite as strongly objected to being ruled from Dublin.  If England, as was alleged, was incapable of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, the Nationalists were fully as incapable of governing the northern counties according to Ulster ideas.  If Ireland, with only one-fifteenth of the population of the United Kingdom, had a right to choose its own form of government, by what equity could the same right be denied to Ulster, with one-fourth of the population of Ireland?

As had been anticipated at Londonderry House, Mr. Asquith and some of his followers did their best to drive a wedge between the Ulstermen and the Southern Unionists, by contending that the former, in supporting the amendment, were deserting their friends.  Mr. Balfour declared in answer to this that “nothing could relieve Unionists in the rest of Ireland except the defeat of the measure as a whole”; and a crushing reply was given by Mr. J.H.  Campbell and Mr. Walter Guinness, both of whom were Unionists from the South of Ireland.  Mr. Guinness frankly acknowledged that “it was the duty of Ulster members to take this opportunity of trying to secure for their constituents freedom from this iniquitous measure.  It would be merely a dog-in-the-manger policy for those who lived outside Ulster to grudge relief to their co-religionists merely because they could not share it.  Such self-denial on Ulster’s part would in no way help them (the Southerners) and it would only injure their compatriots in the North.”