No words of ours are needed to emphasize the statesman-
:hip, the good sense, and the essential moderation of this offer. Sir Edward Carson might most reasonably have Insisted that, if a Referendum excluded a county, only a Referendum could include it. Again, he might have insisted that the area to which a Referendum should be applied must not be a county area, but that area of homogeneous Ulster made up of what we have called the six Plantation counties. So anxious, however, was Sir Edward Carson to meet Mr. Asquith half-way, and not to wreck the possibility of com- promise and invoke civil war by asking too much, that he expressed his willingness to take the tremendous responsibility of putting Mr. Aeqaith's offer at once to the Ulster Council— if only the preposterous time-limit were withdrawn.
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