the country should not be kept in anxious suspense. The only proper way
of making the proposals known was, he said, by embodying them at once in
a Bill to amend the Home Rule Bill. He confirmed Chamberlain's statement
that nothing short of the exclusion of Ulster would be of the slightest
use. The Covenanters were not men who would have acted as they had done
for the sake of minor details that could be adjusted by "paper
safeguards," they were "fighting for a great principle and a great
ideal," and if their determination to resist was not morally justified
he "did not see how resistance could ever be justified in history at
all." But if the exclusion of Ulster was to be offered, he would
immediately go to Belfast and lay the proposal before his followers. He
did not intend "that Ulster should be a pawn in any political game," and
would not allow himself to be manoeuvred into a position where it could
afterwards be said that Ulster had resorted to arms to secure something
that had been rejected when offered by legislation. The sympathy of
Ulstermen with Loyalists in other parts of Ireland was as deep and
sincere as ever, but no one had ever supposed that Ulster could by force
of arms do more than preserve her own territory from subjection to
Dublin. As for the Nationalists, they would never succeed in coercing
Ulster, but "by showing that good government can come under Home Rule
they might try and win her over to the case of the rest of Ireland."
That was a plan that had never yet been tried.

The significance of the announcement which Mr. Asquith had now made lay
in the fact that it was an acknowledgment by the Government for the
first time that there was an "Ulster Question" to be dealt with--that
Ulster was not, as had hitherto been the Liberal theory, like any other
minority who must submit to the will of the majority opposed to it, but
a distinct community, conditioned by special circumstances entitling it
to special treatment. The Prime Minister had thus, as Mr. Bonar Law