the latter listened to it with secret pleasure, perceiving that it was
in reality more damaging to the Government than to themselves, since
Ministers were forced into an attitude of defence against their own
usually docile supporters. It may here be mentioned that at a much later
date, when Mr. John Ward, in the light of experience gained by his own
distinguished service as an officer in the Great War, had come to the
conviction that "the possibility of forcing Ulster within the ambit of a
Dublin Parliament has now become unthinkable," he acknowledged that in
1914 the only way by which Mr. Asquith's Home Rule Act could have been
enforced was through and by the power of the Army.[77]

So much shaken were the Government by these attacks that on the next
day, the 25th of March, Colonel Seely, at the end of a long narrative of
the transaction, announced his resignation from the Government. He had,
he said, unintentionally misled his colleagues by adding without their
knowledge to the paper given to General Gough; the Cabinet as a whole
was quite innocent of the great offence given to democratic sentiment.
This announcement having had the desired effect of relieving the
Ministry as a whole from responsibility for the "peccant paragraphs,"
and averting Radical wrath from their heads, the Prime Minister later in
the debate said he was not going to accept Seely's resignation. Yet Mr.
Churchill exhibited a fine frenzy of indignation against Mr. Austen
Chamberlain for describing it as a "put-up job."

Only a fairly fertile imagination could suggest a transaction to which
the phrase would be more justly applicable. The idea that Seely, in
adding the paragraphs, was tampering in any way with the considered
policy of the Cabinet was absurd, although it served the purpose of
averting a crisis in the House of Commons. He had been in constant and
close communication with Churchill, who had himself been present at the