Sir Edward Carson, in supporting the amendment, insisted that “Ulster was not asking for anything” except to be left within the Imperial Constitution; she “had not demanded any separate Parliament.”  He accepted the “basic principle” of the amendment, but would not be content with the four counties which alone it proposed to exclude from the Bill.  He only accepted it, however, on two assumptions—­first, that the Bill was to become law; and, second, that it was to be, as Mr. Asquith had assured them, part of a federal system for the United Kingdom.  If the first steps were being taken to construct a federal system, there was no precedent for coercing Ulster to form part of a federal unit which she refused to join.  He had been Solicitor-General when the Act establishing the Commonwealth of Australia was being discussed, and it never would have passed, he declared, “if every single clause had not been agreed to by every single one of the communities concerned.”  Ministers were always basing their Irish policy on Dominion analogies, but could anyone, Carson asked, imagine the Imperial Government sending troops to compel the Transvaal or New South Wales to come into a federal system against their will?

The arguments in favour of the amendment were also stated with uncompromising force by Mr. William Moore, Mr. Charles Craig, and his brother Captain James Craig, the last-mentioned taking up a challenge thrown down by Mr. Birrell in a maladroit speech which had expressed doubt as to the reality of the danger to be apprehended in Ulster.  Captain Craig said they would immediately take steps in Ulster to convince the Chief Secretary of their sincerity.  Lord Hugh Cecil, in an outspoken speech, greatly to the taste of English Unionists, “had no hesitation in saying that Ulster would be perfectly right in resisting, and he hoped she would be successful.”

In the division on Mr. Agar-Robartes’s amendment the Government majority fell to sixty-nine, both the “Tellers” being usual supporters of the Ministry.  Mr. F.E.  Smith, in a vigorous speech to the Belfast Orangemen on the 12th of July, declared that “on the part of the Government the discussion (on Mr. Agar-Robartes’s amendment) was a trap. ...  The Government hoped that Ulster would decline the amendment in order that the Coalition might protest to the constituencies:  ’We offered Ulster exclusion and Ulster refused exclusion—­where is the grievance of Ulster? where her justification for armed revolt?’” The snare was avoided; but the debate was a landmark in the movement, for it was then that the spokesmen of Ulster for the first time publicly accepted the idea of separate treatment for themselves as a possible alternative policy to the integral maintenance of the Union.