HOW ULSTER WOULD INTERPRET A WITH- DRAWAL OF THE OFFER
OF EXCLUSION.
BEFORE we leave the subject we desire to say a word upon an aspect of the problem which must fill with grave anxiety all Unionists, and, indeed, all men who are not willing to accept civil war light-heartedly. And here we must speak plainly, even if we run some risk of appearing to fall away from that reasonableness and moderation which we are preaching. If an agreement is not reached, it will be because the Government are not willing in the last resort to exclude those homogeneous parts of North-East Ulster which will fight rather than go under a Dublin Parliament. But if the Government refuse exclusion, their reason for doing so will be that the Nationalist extremists will have for- bidden any agreement of this kind. Now if once an agreement which would have avoided civil war has been vetoed in this way, it is impossible that things will not be infinitely worse than they are now. The Protestants of North-East Ulster, rightly or wrongly, will feel that their worst suspicions have been justified, and that feeling will be shared by hundreds of thousands of Englishmen and Scotsmen. These men will say, and they will say it, in our opinion, with justice : " See what has happened ! The Nationalists are determined to have Ulster to plunder and to misrule. They are not satisfied with ruling themselves or with ruling those parts of Ireland where it is clearly the will of the majority and where the population is homogeneous in racial origin and in religious faith. They will not be satisfied with that. They will not be content unless they can domineer over us. They want our money, but they want even more to say, ' Who is master in Ireland now ? ' "
We are bound to say that it will be very difficult to answer such an appeal as this or to show that it is unfounded. In our opinion one of the most sinister and alarming things in the whole situation is the refusal of the Nationalists to allow, even temporarily, as Mr. Winston Churchill put it, the exclusion of homogeneous North-East Ulster. Surely, if the Nationalists mean what the Liberal interpreters of their policy say they mean, i.e., only good- will to Ulster and a desire to provide the best possible government for the whole of Ireland, they would say to North-East Ulster : " Certainly, if you wish it, stand out of the governance of the Irish Parliament and Executive for a time. We are Home Rulers in the spirit as well as in the letter, and we are not going first to claim the principle of self-government for ourselves and then to with- hold it from you. We believe in our principle so much that we will apply it without fear or favour. We do not want to force any Irish district to be governed against its will. We have seen too much of the dangers of such a policy. Indeed, it is the negation of that policy which is our essential principle. We are perfectly confident that after North-East Ulster has watched the develop- ment of the rest of Ireland she will recognize that her suspicions were ill-founded, and she will voluntarily join us and take her share in Irish politics. In a very few years she will be deeply regretting that she did not share the glory of helping to lay the foundation-stone of Irish autonomy." Who can deny that if the Nationalists really meant well by North-East Ulster that is the attitude which they would adopt ? Are we not justified then in saying that the blank refusal of the Nationalists to take up this attitude is a very sinister fact, and must be extra- ordinarily alarming to the people of North-East :Ulster ? When Shylock says he will have nothing but his pound of flesh, and will not be put off by any sort of com- promise, we know what it means. He wants revenge and destruction, and not an honourable settlement with his debtor.
If, then, all possibility of agreement is destroyed by Mr. Redmond, or more probably by Mr. Devlin, how can we blame the people of North-East Ulster if they are ten times more alarmed by the prospect of Dublin rule than they were before, and ten times more willing to go to the last extreme to avoid it ? And how shall we be able to blame
the Unionists who support them in their struggle when the Government have in effect first told them that they recognize Ulster's right to stand out, at any rate tem- porarily, and then, on reflection, or rather at the bidding of the extremists, refuse ? Can a state of things more alarming for the Ulstermen be imagined ? Could anything have been done more likely to make them dread Home Rule? This view is so obvious that on the whole it fills us with optimism. We cannot believe that a body of men so able as the Cabinet have not been capable of seeing the tremendous danger which would flow from first admitting in spirit, if not in words, Ulster's case for exclusion and then refusing it. Even if the Unionist leaders were foolish enough to let themselves be guided by their extremists and refuse an agreement to avoid civil war, the Government could not be excused. After all, it is Govern- ments that govern or misgovern, and provoke or do not provoke, civil war, and no Government could really excuse itself on such a punctilio as : " We are obliged to shed blood because those naughty Unionist leaders were uncivil to us and would not play the game properly." You can mow men down with machine guns because you think it right to do so or because they have dared to resist what you considered a good policy for the country, but you cannot mow them down because in your opinion your political opponents did not behave prettily or because they would not do this or that which you wanted them to do. In the last resort the exclusion of Ulster is either right or wrong, good policy or bad policy, and if it is bad policy it cannot be adopted merely to score off the Unionists. But though this is a fundamental fact, we are quite certain that the Unionist leaders ought to do and will do everything possible to make it easier. not harder, for the Government to avoid civil war. Unionists feel, of course, that the proper solution is a Referendum or a general election, but they are not going because of that to abandon the attempt to prevent civil war. If they cannot avoid civil war in any other way they will avoid it by consenting to a Bill providing for the exclusion of homogeneous North-East Ulster.
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