Meantime, throughout the summer, while the Government were complacently
carrying their Bill through Parliament for the second time, the Press
was packed with suggestions for averting the crisis which everybody
except the Cabinet recognised as impending.

It began to be whispered in the clubs and lobbies that the King might
exercise the prerogative of veto, and even men like Lord St. Aldwyn and
the veteran Earl of Halsbury, both of them ex-Cabinet Ministers,
encouraged the idea; but there was no widespread acceptance of the
notion that even in so exceptional a case His Majesty would reject the
advice of his responsible Ministers. But in a letter to _The Times_ on
the 4th of September, Mr. George Cave, K.C., M.P. (afterwards Home
Secretary, and ultimately Lord of Appeal), suggested that the King might
"exercise his undoubted right" to dissolve Parliament before the
beginning of the next session, in order to inform himself as to whether
the policy of his Ministers was endorsed by the people.

But a much greater sensation was created a few days later by a letter
which appeared in _The Times_ on the 11th of the same month over the
signature of Lord Loreburn. Lord Loreburn had been Lord Chancellor at
the time the Home Rule Bill was first introduced, but had retired from
the Government in June 1912, being replaced on the Woolsack by Lord
Haldane. When the first draft of the Home Rule Bill was under discussion
in the Cabinet in preparation for its introduction in the House of
Commons, two of the younger Ministers, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston
Churchill, proposed that an attempt should be made to avert the stern
opposition to be expected from Ulster, by treating the northern
Province, or a portion of it, separately from the rest of Ireland. This
proposal was not acceptable to the Cabinet as a whole, and its authors
were roundly rated by Lord Loreburn for so unprincipled a lapse from