able Ministers who had been face to face with that problem for years.
They must have supposed that their leading opponents were capable of
saying emphatically one thing and meaning quite another. For the
Unionist leaders had stated over and over again in the most unmistakable
terms, both in the recent debate on the Address, and on innumerable
former occasions, that nothing except the "exclusion of Ulster" could
furnish a basis for negotiation towards settlement.

And yet, when the Prime Minister at last put his cards on the table on
the 9th of March, in moving the second reading of the Home Rule
Bill--which now entered on its third and last lap under the Parliament
Act--it was found that his much-trumpeted proposals were derisory to the
last degree. The scheme was that which came to be known as county option
with a time limit. Any county in Ulster, including the cities of Belfast
and Derry, was to be given the right to vote itself out of the Home Rule
jurisdiction, on a requisition signed by a specified proportion of its
parliamentary electorate, for a period of six years.

Mr. Bonar Law said at once, on behalf of the Unionist Party, that apart
from all other objections to the Government scheme, and they were many,
the time limit for exclusion made the whole proposal a mockery. All that
it meant was that when the preparations in Ulster for resistance to Home
Rule had been got rid of--for it would be practically impossible to keep
them in full swing for six years--Ulster should then be compelled to
submit to the very thing to which she refused to submit now. Carson
described the proposal as a "sentence of death with a stay of execution
for six years." He noted with satisfaction indeed the admission of the
principle of exclusion, but expressed his conviction that the time limit
had been introduced merely in order to make it impossible for Ulster to
accept. Ulster wanted the question settled once for all, so that she