TOPICS OF THE DAY.
WHAT MR. ASQUITH WILL PROPOSE.
Q INCE wo wrote last week a great change has come 1.7 over the political situation. On Monday Mr. Asquith, with the object of avoiding civil war, will make proposals for altering the Home Rule Bill. Unless the whole of the Liberal Press is misinformed, those proposals will take the form of fitting the Bill with the safety-valve which was suggested in the Spectator of January 6th, 1912, and repeated throughout the debates during the second reading and the Committee stages of the Bill. The safety- valve we recommended to prevent the explosion of civil war was the giving to any Irish county the right to demand a poll of its electors as to whether it should or should not come under the Home Rule Bill. If, when we put our proposal for Exclusion in this form, the Government had accepted it, and had introduced it as an amendment of their Bill, we have little doubt that it would have been accepted by the Protestants of the North, and that there would then have been no Covenant and no raising of an armed force in Ulster. The question now is whether the Ulstermen can be induced to accept the Government's proposals, or whether they come too late.
Let us at once say for ourselves that we most sincerely hope that the Government's proposals will be accepted by the Northern Protestants. We say this in spite of our belief that the Ulstermen may rightly urge that the Government have acted with criminal recklessness and cynicism in putting off their offer till the last moment—putting it off, that is, to a time when public feeling in Ulster has been roused to such a pitch of excitement as must make it extremely difficult for the Ulster leaders to induce their supporters to agree to a " contracting-out" clause. At present the men of the North are demanding that the whole of the province of Ulster shall be excluded from the Home Rule Bill. There is, however, a very general belief and understanding that if the Government should propose to leave out, not the whole of Ulster, but the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Derry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh, the Covenanters, though loth to seem to desert Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan, could under pressure be induced to agree to the com- promise, difficult as it would no doubt be in many cases to persuade the signatories to the Covenant that they were not going back upon their pledges. To get the Covenanters, however, to agree to a scheme which may in fact mean the inclusion of the counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh under a Dublin Parliament is in exist- ing circumstances a very different matter. In these two counties the population is very evenly balanced between Protestants and Roman Catholics; but it is highly probable that on a Referendum there would in both cases be a alight Roman Catholic majority against Exclusion. This means that in the present state of excitement a poll of the electors on the question of Inclusion or Exclusion would be conducted under conditions only too likely to lead to riot and bloodshed.
Strongly in favour as we are, in principle and under normal conditions, of a direct poll of the people, we recognize that just now such a course might be very dangerous. We hold, then, that it would be far better to try to arrive at an Exclusion settlement without risking the taking of a poll of the people. What would give absolute security against civil war would be to take the area of the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Derry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh, which may fairly be called "the homogeneous Ulster," since there is an overwhelming Protestant majority therein, and treat it as a unit. Such a scheme is not logical, of course; but since it would avoid the risk of civil commo- tion, it is, in our opinion, the better solution. And here we may say that this is the reason why we have of late changed our demand from giving any Irish county that likes the right to contract itself out, to the demand for the Eppel& Exclusion of the six counties. After the signing of the Covenant and the arming of Ulster, we recognized that circumstances had changed, and that the demands of national security made it safer, and therefore wiser, to pro- pose the Exclusion by agreement of the homogeneous Ulster composed. of the six counties. We hold, then, that the Government would now be much better advised to agree to the compromise of the Exclusion
of the six counties without a direct appeal to the electors. A compromise it would be, not merely in name, but in essence. The Protestants of the North, without any idea of bargaining, but ex animo, demand the Exclusion of the whole of Ulster. The Nationalists, on the other band, demand, in effect, that Exclusion shall not extend beyond the four counties. The Exclusion of the six counties would thus be an example of that splitting of the difference between two rival demands which is so often found to be the best basis for "an agreement to avoid hostilities."
But though we feel this would be far the better plan, we will say frankly that we trust the English Unionists in the last resort will do their utmost to persuade the Ulstermen to accept the contracting-out scheme, and will, if the Government insist on it, not take the respon- sibility of refusing their assent to it. It may well be, indeed, that the Unionists of Great Britain should take upon themselves the responsibility of accepting the Government's offer, and then putting pressure upon the Covenanters to accept it for better or worse. Agree- ment might then be obtained under the force majeure of British Unionist opinion when it could not be obtained as a voluntary act by the Covenanters. We would rather let the Covenanters think the Unionist Party had failed them, or even treated them hardly, than expose them to the horrors of civil war.
Until we know Mr. Asquith's proposals in detail, we had better refrain from further comment. We should, however, like to restate very shortly one or two arguments in favour even of Exclusion in the limited sense.
(1) Exclusion will avoid civil war by giving the Dublin Parliament no rights over any county area in which the majority of the inhabitants desire to remain under the Parliament at Westminster.
(2) It will give the only form of protection which will be adequate to those left under the rule of it Dublin Parliament. The oppression of the Protestants in the South and West will be impossible while the North-Eastern counties hold hostages for good behaviour.
(3) Exclusion will be a standing physical protest against the disruption of the United Kingdom.
(4) Should the experiment of Irish self-government break down, as we hold it must, it will be far easier to go back to the status quo of the Union—the only sound way of regulating the political relations between the two islands— than it would be if the whole of Ireland were placed under a Dublin Parliament.
(5) We shall have some three-quarters of a million guardians of the interests, not only of the Loyalists of Ireland, but of Imperial interests, securely planted on the soil of Ireland.
(6) The great commercial interests of the North-East of Ireland, which have been built up, not by Government encouragement, but by the energy and independence of the inhabitants, will be secure from being tampered with by a Dublin Parliament.
Before we leave the present subject it may interest our readers if we recall the words in which we demanded in 1912 that any Irish county which desired to do so should have the right to contract itself out of the Bill. On January 6th, 1912—that is, several weeks before the Home Rule Bill was introduced—we sug- gested that in any Ulster county which so desired there should be " a poll of the electors as to whether the pro- visions of the Home Rule Bill shall or shall not come into operation in their county." This demand that the safety- valve of liberty to contract out should be fitted to the Bill we urged week by week throughout the debates on the Home Rule Bill. As we put it on another occasion in 1912— " In all sincerity we ask Liberals first to face the facts, and then, if they still insist that there must be a Home Rule Bill, to take the only way to prevent the bloodshed which they know, and we know, they detest beyond measure. Their only way is to exempt from the operation of the Home Rule Bill any county of Ulster in which there is a majority in favour of remaining under the Parliament at Westminster. Those who pretend otherwise are either ignorant of the facts, or wilfully, and so criminally, refusing to face them."
This is the point which, after so much beat and risk, we have at last reached.' We pray God that we have not reached it too late I
Previous page
