TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ULSTER PROBLEM. -NAT E are surprised that the Government majority was not larger on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill. At the present moment, if there is one thing which the ordinary Liberal dreads more than another it is a " dissolution." The notion of going to the constituencies just now fills not only the party as a whole but each individual member with a sense of sickening terror. No Neapolitan bravo was ever more horrified at the thought of facing a firing party before he could see his priest, make his confession, and get his absolution than is the Govern- ment member at the thought of going upon a platform and trying to explain to angry and suspicious voters the beauty and goodness of the organized hypocrisy. He is passion- ately anxious to be better prepared, to make his peace, to compose his political soul before he meets his executioners. He clings to the hope that if only a little time can be gained he will be able to go to his doom with steadier nerves and a less faltering voice. That being so, it is most surprising that the Liberals did not have a better division on Tuesday night. Without being told so by the Whips, every Liberal member knows that the Government will not be able to keep on, i.e., will be forced to dissolve, if they are not well supported in the lobbies. The more disgusted the rank and file are with the Government the more essential they feel it to support the Cabinet.
The Second Reading debate turned inevitably upon the Ulster question. That is the chief, nay the sole, Home Rule problem now before Parliament. Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that the coalition majority in the House of Commons are determined to destroy the Union in some form or other, they are at once confronted with the menacing questions : " How about Ulster ? How are you going to apply your principle of local self-government and your principle that the will of the local majority must prevail, to the Protestant counties of the North ? " This is the touchstone by which the Home Rule Bill must be tested, whether the Liberals and the Nationalists like it or not. Mr. Asquith tried to deal with it on Monday night, but with a signal want of success. Marvellous debater and past master of parliamentary dialectics as be is, he utterly failed to make out anything which even looked like a good case for forcing the people of North-East Ulster under a Dublin Parliament. The best he could do, and it was a sorry best, was to beg the question and assume that some sort of Home Rule Bill must be passed, an assumption which is the last refuge of men beaten in argument. There is not one of Mr. Asquith's opponents who will for a moment admit that some sort of Home Rule Bill must be passed.
Let us see point by point how Mr. Asquith made out his case. He began by declaring that the whole case against the Bill rests upon the supposed hostility of Ulster, or rather of the four counties. After admitting the significance and moment of that opposition, he went on to ask, " Is there any reasonable expedient or sug- gestion consistent with the governing purpose and policy of this Bill by which the sentiment of hostility can be reconciled or appeased ? " Mr. Asquith tried to fore- stall the answer by another question. " You ask us," be said, " what, if you pass your Bill, are you going to do with the four Ulster counties ? I say, and I ask the same question with the same seriousness, What, if you reject this Bill, are you going to do with Leinster, Munster, and Connaught and the remainder of Ulster ? ' " That is a question not only from which we do not shrink, but which we welcome with avidity, for it puts in a nutshell what we may call the practical or expediency side of the Unionist argument, the side which appeals most to the practical man, and is therefore from many points of view the most potent. We are going to keep Leinster, Munster, and Connaught where they now are—that is, in the Union. Our reasons are plain. The Parliamentary Union is the only way of regulating the political and social relations between the island of Great Britain and the island of Ireland, and it is also the only way of regulating the relations between the different parts of Ireland, bloodshed and chaos. It is the form of government which divides us least and divides the Irish least. The Parliamentary Union and incorporation of Ireland and Great Britain into one organic State was not an arrange- ment which dropped from heaven—or sprang up from hell, as the Nationalists would probably contend in their picturesque way. The Union came because it was inevitable, because we had tried every other form of regulating the relations between the two islands—the system of purely despotic government which was tried first by Charles and then by Cromwell ; the system of a subordinate Parliament, very much like that which is now to be set up, which was tried throughout the first three quarters of the eighteenth century ; the system of complete Parliamentary indepen- dence, which was tried during the last quarter ; and all the intermediate shades and transitionary arrangements, which were temporarily applied between the passing of Poynings' Act and the Union. In those three hundred years of Ireland's agony and England's angry discom- fiture we boxed. the constitutional compass. Each and all of our devices proved the most dismal, the most bloody of failures. Then Pitt in despair, not because he liked it in the abstract, not because he wanted it to gratify any national ambition for rule, not because he was a prophet or heaven-born statesman, but purely as a pis aller, as the only thing left to try, tried the incorporating Union. At once the Union proved a success. Ever since the Union Ireland has, at. any rate, been free from what she had never before in her history been free from, that is, armed rebellion and social anarchy.
During the hundred and thirteen years that Ireland has been incorporated with the rest of the United Kingdom, a very short period in the life of a nation, her position has steadily improved till at this moment it is not too much to say that Ireland is more prosperous materially, and her people less liable to political and social oppression, than at any time in her history. The Union holds the field, and until it can be shown that it has failed and that Ireland is not progressing under it, our answer to the question, " What are you going to do with Leinster, Munster, and Connaught ? " is " Keep them in the Union." The Union is the status quo, and no wise statesman, as Mr. Asquith knows quite well, alters the status quo unless he is sure that he has got something better to put in its place. Leinster, Munster, and Connaught are not in insurrection, and are not going to rise in insurrection even if the Home Rule Bill is rejected. As everyone knows, their inhabitants will accept that rejection, some of them with unconcealed delight, some of them with concealed satisfaction, and the rest with sombre acquies- cence. There is not the slightest fear of the Irish farmers flying to arms even though they are balked of a tribute of some two and a half millions a year from the British taxpayer. It is surprising, perhaps, that they should not show greater disappointment at the thought of an offer so splendid being withdrawn ; but, after all, the Irishman is something of a cynic, and he has never quite believed that even Englishmen could really be so foolish as to set up this system of inverted tribute. To the mass of the population the thing has always seemed rather too much like a fairy tale to be possible. To put it plainly, even if Mr. Asquith's dilemma is true, and you have got to choose between insurrection in the South of Ireland and insurrection in the North, we should certainly say, quite apart from the merits, that the wise plan is to maintain the status quo. It would be an act of lunacy to prevent insurrection in the South by stimulating it in the North. If the dilemma is a reality, then surely the proper way for the Government would be either to exclude the North-East of Ulster or to give her a separate Parliament, not to force the Protestant North under the Catholic South. If there is anything in Mr. Asquith's dilemma it leads straight to separate treatment for Ulster or leaving Ulster out of the Home Rule Bill altogether, not to the present Home Rule Bill. Mr. Asquith was, of course, too clever a dialectician to think that he could ignore these considerations in regard to Ulster. He tried to meet them by saying that the exclusion of North-East Ulster would not in the least mitigate the antagonism to the Bill. " The exclusion of Ulster upon the premises of the opponents of this Bill affords no solution whatever." Mr. Asquith is wrong, and it is as certain as anything can be that he knows he is wrong, and was simply attempting to confuse the mind of the House of Commons. It is perfectly true that we and other opponents of Home Rule should go on opposing it, even if the Government yielded to our demand for the exclusion of Ulster. We should oppose it on a dozen absolutely sound grounds, and chief among these the monstrous financial injustice done to the taxpayers of England by the Bill and also the political injustice done by allowing forty-two Irish representatives to interfere in our minutest domestic affairs while our voters and representatives are excluded from touching the domestic concerns of Ireland. Mr. Asquith is forgetting, or pre- tending to forget, that we ask for the exclusion of Ulster not to improve his measure or to make a bad Bill into a good Bill, but for a perfectly different and perfectly sound reason. We ask for the exclusion of Ulster on the ground of expediency and to prevent the horrors of civil war. We say to him and his party : " If you must have your un- reasonable, your unjust and injurious scheme, at any rate fit it with a safety valve which will prevent the shedding of blood. Your engine will in any case break down, but before you put it on the streets, for mercy's sake take a precaution which will prevent a frightful disaster. We are not speaking as legislators ; we are only trying, in your own interests and our own, to save you from a crime. To make a bad engine is folly. To build it on such lines that it must kill innocent people, as you propose, is to do murder." For Mr. Asquith to turn round upon this and say : "I cannot fit my engine with your safety valve unless you will promise me that if I do you will thereupon swear that my engine is the finest in the world, and that you never saw a better," is a piece of preposterous cant. We are astounded that he could have had the hardihood to put it forward even to that predatory concourse of political atoms which he calls his party. Like a wise man, Mr. Asquith did not stay long upon this point. The ice was too thin even for so accomplished a skater over weak places. He turned next to the demand for a general election, and dealt with it in a manner equally sophistical. What was the good, he asked, of giving the electors a chance to vote on the Bill ? " Suppose the result were that we were to win ? Is that going to stifle or get rid of or subdue the hostility of Ulster ? " The people who signed the covenant are not going to abandon their attitude because a majority of the electors of Great Britain think they are wrong. But if they are not, what is the use of asking for a general election ?
We will tell Mr. Asquith, though, of course, he knows it well enough already. We say to him : "If you have decided that you must in any case coerce Ulster and force her under the dominion of a Dublin Parliament, then, from your own point of view, you are bound to choose the way of coercing her which will be the most effective, the most overwhelming, the least likely to cause blood- shed, the least' likely to involve the rest of the United Kingdom in civil war. You must, if you care anything for your country, and if you desire to minimize the course of bloodshed upon which you are entering—you must face Ulster with a united England and Scotland behind you. You must lay the doubt, which is clearly in youri mind, that the people of Great Britain do not really want to force the men of the North under the South. You know perfectly well that although the people of Ulster may tell you, and tell you truly, that they will not submit even if at a general election the people of Great Britain tell them that they must submit, yet nevertheless the task of forcing them to submit by arms would be much less terrible, much less prolonged, much less bloody, after a successful election. As a merciful man, as a man who does not delight in bloodshed, but who wants to carry his will not in the harshest but in the easiest way, you know the tremendous advantage which you will gain by having consulted the people of England and Scotland before you turn the soldiers into the streets of Belfast and into the fields of the four counties. If you coerce the people of Ulster before the general election you know that you will have volunteers pouring in from England and Scotland to help the Ulstermen, that they will be encouraged to do this by the leaders of the Opposition here, that huge funds will be subscribed in England to assist the people of Ulster in buying arms and ammunition, and that in fact the whole of the Unionist Party will be solid to help Ulster and to keep her resistance alive. You know, on the other hand, that if you hold the general election first, and if you win—and it is your whole case that you will win, because you declare you have the people of this country with you—then the coercion of Ulster will assume not the awful form of civil war, but merely the form of local rioting. Not only will the Unionist Party not be assisting Ulster, but will be doing its best to keep the people of Ulster quiet and to reconcile them, for the time at any rate, to the inevitable. If the present Government is returned to power with a mandate to force Ulster under the dominion of a Dublin. Parliament, even the Ulster people, whatever they may say now, will be to a great extent dominated and subdued by the decision of England and Scotland. Brave as they are, many of them would feel that it is useless to kick against the pricks, and that their resistance had better not take the form of armed insurrection. In fine, you know that the attempt to coerce Ulster after a successful general election will be infinitely less bloody than if you attempt it when the Ulstermen sincerely believe, and have a right to believe, that the country has never given you a mandato to shoot them down. In your own Cabinet, in your own party in the House of Commons, and, still more, in your party in the country, there is hardly a man who at heart would not far rather face the question of putting down Ulster after a general election than before it. Your suggested reason for not having a general election is a snare—a piece of political craft. Your real reason is that you are afraid that the Home Rule Bill would be lost at the polls. Therefore, horrible as it is, you have decided to coerce Ulster without getting the endorsement of the electors. Do you in your heart feel happy at the thought of shedding men's blood on a point of party and political convenience like this ? "
That is the question which we put in all seriousness to Mr. Asquith, and in regard to which we are certain of the answer. Mr. Asquith, whatever he may say in the House, does not feel happy at the thought of coercing Ulster, not on the lino of least, but on the line of most resistance. It is only his miserable entanglements and the wretched obligations which he has undertaken towards the Nationalist Party that prevent him from saying as an honest man and as a humane man, for such in reality ho is, " Before I give the order to shoot down the men of Ulster I will at any rate make it clear to them that in defying me and my Bill they are defying the majority of the people of England and Scotland."
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