We have only one word to say in regard to
the question whether the Government meant business in Ulster, or whether their only idea was to protect a few stands of arms and minor stores of cartridges from hypothetical raids by Ulster extremists. Let any one who wants to decide this question for himself look at the map, and then ask himself how he would have acted if he wanted to deal adequately with the Ulstermen and knock the movement on the head. Surely he would have brought horse, foot and artillery and siege guns and all the paraphernalia of war up from the south and have used them as a broom to sweep the Covenanters towards the sea, where they would have found a powerful fleet full of troops and bluejackets and with plenty of light•draught vessels ready to co-operate with the Army in all the creeks and inlets of an indented coast—ready to co-operate, in fact, as the house- maid's pan co-operates with her brush. The movements which the Government had planned but countermanded for the Army and the Fleet were exactly those which any strategist who knew his business would have planned for dealing with the Ulstermen. As we have explained elsewhere, it is not fair to blame the Government or their strategist, Mr. Churchill, for the scheme in question. Granted that they were deter- mined, as Mr. Churchill said at Bradford, to have done with talking and to come to deeds instead of words, they only obeyed the dictates of common-sense. What they are to be condemned for is not their strategy, but their determination to coerce the Covenanters by horse, foot and artillery rather than by an appeal to the country. There is the crime.
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