IN THE LAST RESORT.
WHAT is to be done in the last resort? What is to be done if all efforts at compromise in the House of Commons fail because the Nationalists demand their full pound of flesh from the Liberals, and will only admit suggestions of compromise which they know to be of a kind that cannot be accepted by the Ulstermen, as, for example, the six-year limit followed by automatic Inclusion ? In that case, we have always held, and still hold, that it will be the duty of the House of Lords to make one last effort to prevent civil war, an effort which will be perfectly appropriate to their true and traditional position in the Constitution as a House of moderating influence and of central opinion, a House not tied to the caucuses or bound by election promises, or. still more, by the thought of how their actions will look to the electors the next time they face their constituents ; in fact, a House of independent and patriotic men. What the House of Lords should do in the last resort is to let the Home Rule Bill be read a second time.—There is no need for Unionists to vote for the Bill : they should simply abstain, and leave the Liberal Peers who believe in it to vote for it.—When the Bill was in Committee the Unionist leaders would make it clear in their speeches that they not only do not assent to, but dissent strongly from, the principle of the Bill, and also dissent strongly from the way in which that principle has been carried out. They would refuse to take any responsibility for it, but would show that they were acting with the sole desire and endeavour to avoid civil war. Next, they should add to the Bill certain clauses designed, not to make a bad Bill into a good Bill—for that is impossible in this case—but solely in order to avoid the arbitrament of civil war. To use our old metaphor, they would explain that what they were doing was not amending the Bill, but fitting a safety-valve to a very badly designed engine. The safety-valve would consist of the Exclusion of the homogeneous Protestant Ulster—that area whose existence has, we note, been admitted by a Liberal Member, Dr. Chapple, who has placed an amendment on the paper which involves the delimitation of Protestant Ulster. That area on investigation will be found to consist of the six Protestant counties, or Ulster minus Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan.
The Lords, true to the principle that they were not attempting to improve the Bill or to take any responsibility for it, should be content with merely limiting the area to which the Home Rule Bill is to apply—i.e., to Ireland less the six counties. All they should do beyond this restriction of the area subject to the Dublin Parliament and Executive is to add the minimum of consequential clauses, including the clauses required to provide for the future government of the excluded area. Our readers have already seen in our pages a draft of those consequential amendments, which occupied only one and a half of our columns, but a draft which, we venture to say, has stood the test of criticism extremely well, and which, we believe, might he quite well adopted en bloc. Since, however, the whole object of the action we propose for the Lords would be to prevent civil war, and therefore to conciliate Liberal opinion, we suggest that they should also accept, as far as physically possible, the rest of Mr. Asquith's offer. It was an imprac- ticable offer as to area and as to time, but only in those respects would we vary it. The area in which the Refer- endum should be taken should be the homogeneous area formed by the six counties. Voting as a whole, and not county by county, for the reasons which we have explained elsewhere, a Referendum should be taken at once, and in order to meet the views of the Ministerialists the time- limit might be made six years certain, with the addition that then another Referendum should be taken to ascertain if the views of the inhabitants of the area had changed. The Bill thus amended, but amended, as we have said, solely in those particulars, and solely with a desire to prevent civil war, should be sent down to the Commons, and it should be left to them either to accept the amendments and pass the Bill, or to reject them and let the cannon speak and (in the Ministerial phrase) " the red blood flow." If what we suggest is done, we feel confident that the pressure of public opinion would be so great that the Government would not dare deliberately to reject proposals
which in principle were their own proposals, which differed, that is to say, only in the matter of area and of the nature of the time-limit. We believe that the British people would say : "You must reach a settlement now. We will not have civil war to please the Nationalists, no matter what agreements the Government may have been foolish enough to enter into in the name of the Liberal Party. The Lords have done their part in not attempting to snatch a party advantage, which they might have done bad they been partisans. They might have forced you to fight at a heavy disadvantage. Instead, they have made a great sacrifice and have met you half-way. It is your duty, as it is the true interest of the Liberal Party, not to trample upon the olive-branch." Probably the exact way in Which the demand for Liberal agreement to the Lords' amendments would be made is indicated by a movement which, we note with satisfaction, is beginning on the Liberal back benches—a demand that the party Whips shall be taken off in regard to the matter of agreeing or disagreeing with the Lords' amendments, and that each member of the House of Commons shall be allowed to vote as his conscience may direct him. To refuse such a demand would surely be impossible. But if it were granted we do not believe that the Lords' amendments would be rejected. There must be at least forty-five men in the Liberal Party who would not like to feel that their votes had set flowing a river of blood like that which Denton once confessed he desired to see roll batween the two sections of the French nation. It is not necessary to dwell upon the relief the British people as a whole would feel at being freed from the prospect of civil war owing to an attempt to coerce Ulster with the bayonet before any attempt had been made to coerce her by the ballot. We should no doubt have established a very bad system for regulating the political relations between the two islands and for governing the South and West of Ireland, but, at any rate, we should not have our hands upon each other's throats. We should have avoided the supreme evil.
Let us now look at what would be the result if our forecast proved wrong, and if the Government rejected the Lords' amendments and refused even to allow their followers to vote as they pleased, but insisted instead on the party Whips being put on and anyone who voted for agreeing to the Lords' amendments being ostracized by the party. In that case, no doubt, the Lords' amend- ments would fail. What then ? The Lords and the Unionist Party generally would have put themselves right with the country, and would be able to face the terrible ordeal in front of them in the way in which all patriotic men must wish to face such an ordeal — with an absolutely clear conscience. They would feel that they had made every sacrifice and done everything in their power to avoid civil war, and that, whatever might be the talk of the extremists, the country would recognize that here were a body of men who had done their duty, who had played a noble part, and who had performed the true function of an Upper House—a body of moderate men intent on securing peace if possible and on saving the country from the murderous fury of unrestrained political partisanship. The case for supporting Ulster in her resistance, unless the will of the nation shall have been first ascertained, is very strong, but it would be ten times as strong after the Lords had made that last effort for peace which we are advocating. It would, indeed, be over- whelming. Whatever may have been his actions when his mind was clouded by party rage, every Englishman in his heart would feel that the Liberals had done wrong in their rejection of the offer to prevent civil war. The Unionists would have put themselves right with public opinion, and would feel that henceforth they, at any rate, were free from any blame for what must happen.
We shall be told that what we suggest cannot be done, because the Unionist Peers could not stultify themselves by agreeing, even through abstention, to the second reading of the Bill. They would be accepting the principle of Home Rule, and that they could not do as men of honour and good faith. We totally and absolutely disagree with this pedantic view of the situation. It is, in the first place, an entirely new view. Hitherto the House of Lords has always been willing, in the higher interests of the country and of conciliation, to read Bills a second time even when it has -rejected and abhorred the principle upon which the Bills rested. The Duke of Wellington not only hated personally the principle of the Reform Bill, but believed it would be ruinous to the best interests of the nation. Yet he and the majority of the Lords assented to the second reading of that Bill. Again, the Lords believed the Disestablishment of the Irish Church to be not only a measure detrimental to the highest interests of the country, but one which violated the Act of Union. Yet they assented to the second reading. But no sane person suggests that in doing so they violated their own conscientious beliefs or in any way stultified themselves. Precedent is clearly in favour of the Peers allowing the second reading of the Home Rule Bill if their object, as in the cases above-named, is not to gain a party advantage, or to conserve their own privileges and interests, but to save the country from revolutionary evils.
The reason for allowing the second reading of a Bill on those grounds is strengthened, not weakened, by the existence of the Parliament Act. As the Lords know that the Bill can be passed over their heads, they will be con- fronted with one of those cases of force racjeure which all reasonable men agree must modify human action. The fact that in any case the Lords cannot now stop the Bill altogether makes it doubly necessary for them to relax no effort to fit the dangerous engine with the safety-valve of our metaphor. To miss the possibility of saving the nation from civil war upon the Parliamentary punctilio that not to dissent from a second reading of a measure is to assent to its principle is, frankly, unworthy of the best traditions of our political and constitutional history. The great Lord Halifax, who was not only the wisest but the most patriotic of men, once used these words : "Circumstances must come in and are to be made a part of the matter of which we are to judge : positive decisions are always dangerous, especially in politics." These words of a great leader in the Lords we commend to the Unionist Peers. A "positive decision" such as that which declares that to allow the second reading of a Bill is to express approval of its principles is just the type of positive decision which is dangerous in politics. The Peers, if they are wise, will eschew it, and will in the last resort take the action we have recommended.
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