THE PROBLEM OF DISSOLUTION.
WE are glad to note that Mr. Bonar Law in his speech, of which we must again express our unbounded admiration for its steadiness of tone and clearness of utterance, insisted upon the crime—for such it would ho- of passing the Home Rule Bill for the third time under the Parliament Act without appealing to the country. We would ask our readers to consider the arguments which ought to weigh with responsible statesmen for dissolving before and not after the third time of asking of the Home Rule Bill. Remember that it is admitted on all hands that the passage of the Home Ruk Bill must in any case be followed by an almost immediate dissolution, and that there is no talk and no possibility of this Parliament jogging on for another two years of useful work after the Home Rule Bill is passed. All that is at issue now is the question of whether the dissolution shall be, say, next May or June or in the December or January following. If the dissolu- tion takes place in May or June, that is, before the third time of asking, and Mr. Asquith is again returned to power —as he certainly will be if his contention is sound, that it is the will of the majority of the people of the United Kingdom to pass a Home Rule Bill—then neither he nor the Irish Party will have suffered the slightest injury. The Parliament Act makes special provision for an appeal to the country of this kind. A Bill can be taken up exactly where it was before the dissolution, and can be at once forced on the Lords. Therefore it cannot be pleaded that the work expended on the Home Rule Bill will be thrown away, or the measure even impeded, by a dissolution.
But it is not merely a case of the Government's policy not being injured by a dissolution. Granted that they are right in saying that they have a majority of the people of the United Kingdom with them, they will gain immensely by the dissolution. In that case the Unionists will be obliged, as clearly as any party could be obliged, not to encourage any sort of resistance in Ulster. It is true that the Ulster members will not give a pledge to abide by the will of the majority, but no sane person doubts that, though they will not make this promise, they must in reality be enormously affected by the weight of a vote adverse to their contentions. If the majority of the voters in the United Kingdom endorse the Bill, and consequently all Unionist encouragement 1 o Ulster ceases, the Ulster resistance will be a comparat sly small matter. Refusal to encourage will in effect be strong discouragement. There may be deep resentment, nay deep hatred, engendered in Ulstermen by what they will regard as the injustice with which they are being treated, but their resistance will not mean civil war, or anything approaching to civil war. In a word, the coercion of Ulster will be simplified and reduced to its easiest terms.
Look at the other side. If the Bill is forced through under the Parliament Act without a dissolution and becomes the law of the land without endorsement at a general election, then the coercion of Ulster must begin under con- ditions so unfavourable that they will amount to civil war. Let no one suppose that the people of North-East Ulster are going to wait till the Bill comes into operation. The moment it is the law of the land they must, granted that they are determined to resist—as assuredly they are, since North-East Ulster is not exempted—take action. That action will no doubt take the form of at once creating the machinery of a provisional govern- ment which will not only speak in the name of North-East Ulster and be prepared to resist every act of the Dublin Parliament and Dublin Executive, but will also provide a voluntary government and administration for the four counties or possibly for the Plantation. But that means a condition of things which will very soon produce a collision. A set of Quakers might conceivably carry on such a policy without provoking a resort to arms. But no .one pretends that the people of North-East Ulster are Quakers. Rightly or wrongly, they are aggressive, . fighting, turbulent men, and it is idle to suppose that in the conditions which would prevail in Belfast there would be peace and quiet. The Government, if they persist in carrying the Bill into operation, will have, before they can do so, to get rid of the provisional government. We may say here that our hypothesis as to the action of the northern Protestants is not based upon any special information. We are not in the secrets of the Ulstermen. Nevertheless we are perfectly convinced that this, or something like this, is what would happen, and that the action of the Ulstermen which would take place immediately on the passing of the Bill, without a day's delay, would be supported by the raising of big subscriptions in England, in Scotland, and throughout the Empire, and, what is more, by the enrolment of large bodies of men here to support Ulster if need be. We know, for example, that even a moderate Home Ruler like Lord Grey has said in public that lie is prepared to subscribe to a fund raised to help Ulster if she is coerced before a general election. Can anyone regard prospects such as these with anything but the utmost anxiety ? That is the way that civil wars begin, and. remember that civil war, whatever people may think for the moment, is in no sense an impossibility. Yet apparently we are going to run these terrible risks simply on a Parliamentary punctilio, on the insistence by the Government that a general election shall be two or three months after and not two or three months before a certain fixed point in June 1914. Plain men will ask what can be the meaning of the madness thus contemplated. What can be at the back of it ? What is at the back of it is the fact that the Government know that if they were now to appeal to the country on the Home Rule Bill they would be beaten, and badly beaten. Very possibly they would rather this happened than be obliged to coerce Ulster with the tacit sanction of the whole of the Unionist Party, but it is urged in private that they cannot help themselves. They are, it is urged, pledged to the Nationalists not to dissolve before the Bill is passed, and they must keep their pledge.
Is there nothing for it then but civil war ? Is there no other way but this ? We believe there is. We believe that though the Cabinet appears to be riding so hard at the impossible fence in front of it, it will not take the fence. It will refuse at the last moment. That at any rate is the prophecy to which we are prepared to commit ourselves. What we imagine is going to happen is something of this kind. The Government will in all probability get through the present Session without a spill. There is to be no autumn Session, and therefore there is no danger of their collapsing then. Accordingly they will meet next February apparently prepared for the worst. The first thing they will do in the new Session will be to introduce a very elaborate, very contentious, and very far-reaching scheme for the abolition of the House of Lords and the erection of a Second Chamber on a democratic basis. This Bill will be certain to cause an enormous amount of dispute in the Liberal Party. The Whig section will not think it moderate enough. The Labour men and the extreme Radicals will regard it as a bridle for their teeth. In a word, agreement will not be found possible, and on the merits of this Bill, and nominally not on Home Rule at all, the dissolution will take place, sometime before June 1st, 1914. There will be no breach of faith with the Irish, because every pledge to them must have been made subject to the Government being able to hold together in regard to other matters of policy. The pledge was only that there should be no dissolution on the Home Rule Bill. It cannot prevent dissolution on another subject.
We admit that all this sounds fantastic, and we can give no proof of what we are asserting. We would, however, call attention to one fact. If Mr. Asquith means other- wise, and if he has the support of his whole Cabinet and party in holding that there must in no circumstances be a dissolution before the third time of asking, we feel sure that we should hear this policy put forward in far stronger terms than now. At present all we hear is a certain amount of dialectic to show that the Unionists have no right to demand a dissolution, and that such a dissolution is unnecessary, because the will of the United Kingdom has already been declared. No one, however, says that the one thing this Government will never do is to dissolve before the third time of asking. Neither Mr. Asquith nor any one of his colleagues has ever nailed the flag of "no dissolution" to the mast. An equal want of bold insistence is to be found in the moderate and responsible Liberal press. In other words, the Liberal Party are in no absolute and hard- and-fast sense committed to the policy of no dissolution. On the other hand, we, of course, fully admit that the Government have never appeared to waver on the point. They could not. If they did their destruction would be immediate. An essential condition of the Ministry surviving another year is the assumption that there will be no dissolution till after the third time of asking. To admit that in all probability there will be a dissolution before, would bring down the Government like a house of cards. Therefore we cannot expect the slightest admission of the possibility of dissolution at present. When the dissolution comes it will come suddenly, and apparently without any premeditation. That, however, need not prevent Ministers in secret, or if you will in their own hearts, from deciding that they cannot face the coercion of Ulster—Ulster supported by the whole of the Unionist Party—without getting first an endorsement of the Home Rule Bill from the electorate.
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