thousand excellent Italian rifles. A rusty and little-known Act of
Parliament had to be dug up to provide legal authority for the seizure.
Many sportsmen and others then learnt for the first time that, under the
Gun-barrel Proof Act, 1868, every gun-barrel in England must bear the
Gun-makers' Company's proof-mark showing that its strength has been
tested and approved. As the penalty for being in possession of guns not
so marked was a fine of £2 per barrel, to have put in a claim for the
Italian rifles seized at Hammersmith would have involved a payment of
more than £12,000, and would have given the Government information as to
the channel through which they had been imported. No move was made,
therefore, so far as the firearms were concerned, but the bayonets
attached to them, for the seizure of which there was no legal
justification, were claimed by Crawford's agent in Hamburg, and
eventually reached Ulster safely by another route. About the same time a
consignment of half a million rounds of small-arm ammunition, which was
discovered by the authorities through faulty packing in cement-bags, was
also confiscated in another part of the country.

These losses convinced Crawford that a complete change of method must be
adopted if faith was to be kept with the Ulster Volunteers, who were
implicitly trusting their leaders to provide them with weapons to enable
them to make good the Covenant. More than a year before this time he had
told the special Committee dealing with arms, to which he was
immediately responsible, that, in his judgment, the only way of dealing
effectively with the problem was not by getting small quantities
smuggled from time to time by various devices and through disguised
ordinary trade channels, but by bringing off a grand _coup_, as if
running a blockade in time of war. He had crossed the Channel on purpose
to submit this view to Sir Edward Carson and Captain Craig early in
1912, but at that time nothing was done to give effect to it.