It is noteworthy that in this prolonged debate there was no reference to the new fact of a second volunteer force.  But on February 12th a question was asked about it.  On the 17th there was allusion to another growing element of danger—­the discussions among officers of the Army of a combined refusal to serve against Ulster.  All these factors must have weighed with Redmond and with his chief colleagues in their discussions with the Government during the next three weeks.  “Friendly consideration” passed into acceptance on March 9th, when Mr. Asquith, introducing the Home Rule Bill for its passage in the third consecutive session (as required by the Parliament Act), outlined the proposed modifications in it.  They involved partition.  But the exclusion was to be optional by areas and limited in time.

The proposal to take a vote by counties had, it will be remembered, been originally suggested by Mr. Bonar Law, and in following the Prime Minister he could not well repudiate it.  The test, however, which he now put forward was whether or not the proposals satisfied Ulster:  and he fixed upon the time-limit of six years as being wholly unacceptable.  Redmond, on the other hand, while declaring that the Government had gone to “the extremest limits of concession,” said that the proposals had one merit:  they would “elicit beyond doubt or question by a free ballot the real opinion of the people of Ulster.”  This indicated his conviction that if Home Rule really came the majority in Ulster would prefer to take their chances under it; the proposal of exclusion being merely a tactical manoeuvre to defeat Home Rule by splitting the Nationalists.

Its efficacy for that purpose was immediately demonstrated.  Mr. O’Brien followed Redmond with a virulent denunciation of “the one concession of all others which must be hateful and unthinkable from the point of view of any Nationalist in Ireland.”  Opposition from Mr. O’Brien and from Mr. Healy was no new thing.  But by acceptance of these proposals the Nationalist leader made their opposition for the first time really formidable.  Telegrams rained in that March afternoon—­above all on Mr. Devlin, from his supporters in Belfast, who felt themselves betrayed and shut out from a national triumph which they had been the most zealous to promote.  From this time onward the position of Redmond personally and of his party as a whole was perceptibly weakened.  Especially an alienation began between him and the Catholic hierarchy.  It was impossible that the clergy should be well disposed towards proposals which, as Mr. Healy put it, would make Cardinal Logue a foreigner in his own cathedral at Armagh.

Yet upon the whole the shake to Redmond’s power was less than might have been expected—­largely, no doubt, because the offer was repelled.  Sir Edward Carson described it as “sentence of death with stay of execution for six years.”  With a great advocate’s instinct, he fastened on the point in the Government’s proposal which was least defensible.