"WHAT ANSWER FROM THE NORTH?"
Public curiosity as to the proposals that the coming Home Rule Bill
might contain was not set at rest by Mr. Churchill's oration in Belfast.
The constitution-mongers were hard at work with suggestions. Attempts
were made to conciliate hesitating opinion by representing Irish Home
Rule as a step in the direction of a general federal system for the
United Kingdom, and by tracing an analogy with the constitutions already
granted to the self-governing Dominions. Closely connected with the
federal idea was the question of finance. There was lively speculation
as to what measure of control over taxation the Bill would confer on the
Irish Parliament, and especially whether it would be given the power to
impose duties of Customs and Excise. Home Rulers themselves were sharply
divided on the question. At a conference held at the London School of
Economics on the 10th of January, 1912, Professor T.M. Kettle, Mr.
Erskine Childers, and Mr. Thomas Lough, M.P., declared themselves in
favour of Irish fiscal autonomy, while Lord Macdonnell opposed the idea
as irreconcilable with the fiscal policy of Great Britain.[22] The
latter opinion was very forcibly maintained a few weeks later by a
member of the Government with some reputation as an economist. Speaking
to a branch of the United Irish League in London, Mr. J.M. Robertson,
Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, summarily rejected fiscal
autonomy for Ireland, which, he said, "really meant a claim for
separation." "To give fiscal autonomy," he added, "would mean
disintegration of the United Kingdom. Fiscal autonomy for Ireland put
an end altogether to all talk of Federal Home Rule, and he could see no
hope for a Home Rule Bill if it included fiscal autonomy."[23]
Although the Secretary to the Board of Trade was probably not in the
confidence of the Cabinet, many people took Mr. Robertson's speech as an
indication of the limits of financial control that the Bill would give
to Ireland. On the same day that it was delivered the Dublin
Correspondent of _The Times_ reported that the demand of the
Nationalists for control of Customs and Excise was rapidly growing, and
that any Bill which withheld it, even if it could scrape through a
National Convention, "would never survive the two succeeding years of
agitation and criticism"; and he agreed with Mr. Robertson that if, on
the other hand, fiscal autonomy should be conceded, it would destroy all
prospect of a settlement on federal lines, and would "establish virtual
separation between Ireland and Great Britain." He predicted that
"Ulster, of course, would resist to the bitter end."[24]
Ulster, in point of fact, took but a secondary interest in the question.
Her people were indeed opposed to anything that would enlarge the
separation from England, or emphasise it, and, as they realised, like
the Secretary to the Board of Trade, that fiscal autonomy would have
this effect, they opposed fiscal autonomy; but they cared little about
the thing in itself one way or the other. Nor did they greatly concern
themselves whether Home Rule proceeded on federal lines or any other
lines; nor whether some apt analogy could or could not be found between
Ireland and the Dominions of the Crown thousands of miles oversea.
Having made up their minds that no Dublin Parliament should exercise
jurisdiction over themselves, they did not worry themselves much about
the powers with which such a Parliament might be endowed. It is
noteworthy, however, in view of the importance which the question
afterwards attained, that so early as January 1912 Sir Edward Carson,
speaking in Manchester, maintained that without fiscal autonomy Home
Rule was impossible,[25] and that some months later Mr. Bonar Law, in a
speech at Glasgow on the 21st of May, said that if the Unionist Party
were in a position where they had to concede Home Rule to Ireland they
would include fiscal autonomy in the grant.[26] These leaders, who,
unlike the Liberal Ministers, had some knowledge of the Irish
temperament, realised from the first the absurdity of Mr. Asquith's
attempt to satisfy the demands of "the rebel party" by offering
something very different from what that party demanded. The Ulster
leader and the leader of the Unionist Party knew as well as anybody that
fiscal autonomy meant "virtual separation between Ireland and Great
Britain," but they also knew that separation was the ultimate aim of
Nationalist policy, and that there could be no finality in the Liberal
compromise; and they no doubt agreed with the forcible language used by
Mr. Balfour in the previous autumn, when he said that "the rotten hybrid
system of a Parliament with municipal duties and a national feeling
seemed to be the dream of political idiots."
The ferment of speculation as to the Government's intentions continued
during the early weeks of the Parliamentary session, which opened on the
14th of February, but all inquiries by members of the House of Commons
were met by variations on the theme "Wait and See." Unionists, however,
realised that it was not in Parliament, but outside, that the only
effective work could be done, in the hope of forcing a dissolution of
Parliament before the Bill could become law. A vigorous campaign was
conducted throughout the country, especially in Lancashire, and
arrangements were made for a monster demonstration in Belfast, which
should serve both as a counter-blast to the Churchill fiasco, and for
enabling English and Scottish Unionists to test for themselves the
temper of the Ulster resistance. In the belief that the Home Rule Bill
would be introduced before Easter, it was decided to hold this meeting
in the Recess, as Mr. Bonar Law had promised to speak, and a number of
English Members of Parliament wished to be present. At the last moment
the Government announced that the Bill would not be presented till the
11th of April, after Parliament reassembled, and its provisions were
therefore still unknown when the demonstration took place on the 9th in
the Show Ground of the Royal Agricultural Society at Balmoral, a suburb
of Belfast.
Feeling ran high as the date of the double event approached, and the
indignant sense of wrong that prevailed in Ulster was finely voiced in a
poem, entitled "Ulster 1912," written by Mr. Kipling for the occasion
which appeared in _The Morning Post_ on the day of the Balmoral
demonstration, of which the first and last stanzas were:
"The dark eleventh hour
Draws on, and sees us sold
To every evil Power
We fought against of old.
Rebellion, rapine, hate,
Oppression, wrong, and greed
Are loosed to rule our fate,
By England's act and deed.
"Believe, we dare not boast,
Believe, we do not fear--
We stand to pay the cost
In all that men hold dear.
What answer from the North?
One Law, One Land, One Throne.
If England drive us forth
We shall not fall alone!"
The preparations for the Unionist leader's coming visit to Belfast had
excited the keenest interest throughout England and Scotland. Coinciding
as it did with the introduction of the Government's Bill, it was
recognised to be the formal countersigning by the whole Unionist Party
of Great Britain of Ulster's proclamation of her determination to resist
her forcible degradation in constitutional status. The same note of
mingled reproach and defiance which sounded in Kipling's verses was
heard in the grave warning addressed by _The Times_ to the country in a
leading article on the morning of the meeting:
"Nobody of common judgment and common knowledge of political
movements can honestly doubt the exceptional gravity of the
occasion, and least of all can any such doubt be felt by any who
know the men of Ulster. To make light of the deep-rooted
convictions which fill the minds of those who will listen to Mr.
Bonar Law to-day is a shallow and an idle affectation, or a token
of levity and of ignorance. Enlightened Liberalism may smile at the
beliefs and the passions of the Ulster Protestants, but it was
those same beliefs and passions, in the forefathers of the men who
will gather in Belfast to-day, which saved Ireland for the British
Crown, and freed the cause of civil and religious liberty in these
islands from its last dangerous foes.... It is useless to argue
that they are mistaken. They have reasons, never answered yet, for
believing that they are not mistaken.... Their temper is an
ultimate fact which British statesmen and British citizens have to
face. These men cannot be persuaded to submit to Home Rule. Are
Englishmen and Scotchmen prepared to fasten it upon them by
military force? That is the real Ulster question."
Other great English newspapers wrote in similar strain, and the support
thus given was of the greatest possible encouragement to the Ulster
people, who were thereby assured that their standpoint was not
misunderstood and that the justice of their "loyalist" claims was
appreciated across the Channel.
Among the numberless popular demonstrations which marked the history of
Ulster's stand against Home Rule, four stand out pre-eminent in the
impressiveness of their size and character. Those who attended the
Ulster Convention of 1892 were persuaded that no political meeting could
ever be more inspiring; but many of them lived to acknowledge that it
was far surpassed at Craigavon in 1911. The Craigavon meeting, though in
some respects as important as any of the series, was, from a spectacular
point of view, much less imposing than the assemblage which listened to
Mr. Bonar Law at Balmoral on Easter Tuesday, 1912; and the latter
occasion, though never surpassed in splendour and magnitude by any
single gathering, was in significance but a prelude to the magnificent
climax reached in the following September on the day when the Covenant
was signed throughout Ulster.
The Balmoral demonstration had, however, one distinctive feature. At it
the Unionist Party of Great Britain met and grasped the hand of Ulster
Loyalism. It gave the leader and a large number of his followers an
opportunity to judge for themselves the strength and sincerity of
Ulster, and at the same time it served to show the Ulstermen the weight
of British opinion ready to back them. Mr. Bonar Law was accompanied to
Belfast by no less than seventy Members of Parliament, representing
English, Scottish, and Welsh constituencies, not a few of whom had
already attained, or afterwards rose to, political distinction. Among
them were Mr. Walter Long, Lord Hugh Cecil, Sir Robert Finlay, Lord
Charles Beresford, Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Amery, Mr. J.D. Baird, Sir
Arthur Griffith-Boscawen, Mr. Ian Malcolm, Lord Claud Hamilton, Mr. J.G.
Butcher, Mr. Ernest Pollock, Mr. George Cave, Mr. Felix Cassel, Mr.
Ormsby-Gore, Mr. Scott Dickson, Mr. W. Peel, Captain Gilmour, Mr. George
Lloyd, Mr. J.W. Hills, Mr. George Lane-Fox, Mr. Stuart-Wortley, Mr.
J.F.P. Rawlinson, Mr. H.J. Mackinder, and Mr. Herbert Nield.
The reception of the Unionist Leader at Larne on Easter Monday was
wonderful, even to those who knew what a Larne welcome to loyalist
leaders could be, and who recalled the scenes there during the historic
visits of Lord Randolph Churchill, Lord Salisbury, and Mr. Balfour. "If
this is how you treat your friends," said Mr. Bonar Law simply, in reply
to one of the innumerable addresses presented to him, "I am glad I am
not an enemy." Before reaching Belfast he had ample opportunity at every
stopping-place of his train to note the fervour of the populace. "Are
all these people landlords?" he asked (in humorous allusion to the
Liberal legend that Ulster Unionism was manufactured by a few
aristocratic landowners), as he saw every platform thronged with
enthusiastic crowds of men and women, the majority of whom were
evidently of the poorer classes. In Belfast the concourse of people was
so dense in the streets that the motor-car in which Mr. Bonar Law and
Sir Edward Carson sat side by side found it difficult to make its way
to the Reform Club, the headquarters of what had once been Ulster
Liberalism, where an address was presented in which it was stated that
the conduct of the Government "will justify loyal Ulster in resorting to
the most extreme measures in resisting Home Rule." In his reply Mr.
Bonar Law gave them "on behalf of the Unionist Party this
message--though the brunt of the battle will be yours, there will not be
wanting help from 'across the Channel.'" At Comber, where a stop was
made on the way to Mount Stewart, he asked himself how Radical Scotsmen
would like to be treated as the Government were treating Protestant
Ulster. "I know Scotland well," he replied to his own question, "and I
believe that, rather than submit to such fate, the Scottish people would
face a second Bannockburn or a second Flodden."
These few quotations from the first utterances of Mr. Bonar Law on his
arrival are sufficient to show how complete was the understanding
between him and the Ulster people even before the great demonstration of
the following day. He had, as _The Times_ Correspondent noted, "already
found favour with the Belfast crowd. All the way from Larne by train to
Belfast and through Belfast by motor-car to Newtownards and Mount
Stewart, his progress was a triumph."
The remarks of the same experienced observer on the eve of the Balmoral
meeting are worth recording, especially as his anticipations were amply
fulfilled.
"To-morrow's demonstration," he telegraphed from Belfast, "both in
numbers and enthusiasm, promises to be the most remarkable ever
seen in Ireland. If expectations are realised the assemblage of men
will be twice as numerous as the whole white population of the
Witwatersrand, whose grievances led to the South African War, and
they will represent a community greater in numbers than the white
population of South Africa as a whole. Unless all the signs are
misleading, it will be the demonstration of a community in the
deadliest earnest. By the Protestant community of Ulster, Home Rule
is regarded as a menace to their faith, to their material
well-being and prosperity, and to their freedom and national
traditions, and thus all the most potent motives which in history
have stirred men to their greatest efforts are here in operation."
No written description, unless by the pen of some gifted imaginative
writer, could convey any true impression of the scenes that were
witnessed the following day in the Show Ground at Balmoral and the roads
leading to it from the heart of the city. The photographs published at
the time give some idea of the apparently unbounded ocean of earnest,
upturned faces, closely packed round the several platforms, and
stretching away far into a dim and distant background; but even they
could not record the impressive stillness of the vast multitude, its
orderliness, which required the presence of not a single policeman, its
spirit of almost religious solemnity which struck every observant
onlooker. No profusion of superlative adjectives can avail to reproduce
such scenes, any more than words, no matter how skilfully chosen, can
convey the tone of a violin in the hands of a master. Even the mere
number of those who took part in the demonstration cannot be guessed
with any real accuracy. There was a procession of men, whose fine
physique and military smartness were noticed by visitors from England,
which was reported to have taken three hours to pass a given point
marching in fours, and was estimated to be not less than 100,000 strong,
while those who went independently to the ground or crowded the route
were reckoned to be at least as many more. The Correspondent of _The
Times_ declared that "it was hardly by hyperbole that Sir Edward Carson
claimed that it was one of the largest assemblies in the history of the
world."
But the moral effect of such gatherings is not to be gauged by numbers
alone. The demeanour of the people, which no organisation or stage
management could influence, impressed the English journalists and
Members of Parliament even more than the gigantic scale of the
demonstration. There was not a trace of the picnic spirit. There was no
drunkenness, no noisy buffoonery, no unseemly behaviour. The Ulster
habit of combining politics and prayer--which was not departed from at
Balmoral, where the proceedings were opened by the Primate of All
Ireland and the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church--was jeered at by
people who never witnessed an Ulster loyalist meeting; but the Editor of
_The Observer_, himself a Roman Catholic, remarked with more insight
that "the Protestant mind does not use prayer simply as part of a
parade;" and _The Times_ Correspondent, who has already been more than
once quoted, was struck by the fervour with which at Balmoral "the whole
of the vast gathering joined in singing the 90th Psalm," and he added
the very just comment that "it is the custom in Ulster to mark in this
solemn manner the serious nature of the issue when the Union is the
question, as something different from a question of mere party
politics."
The spectacular aspect of the demonstration was admirably managed. A
saluting point was so arranged that the procession, on entering the
enclosure, could divide into two columns, one passing each side of a
small pavilion where Mr. Bonar Law, Sir Edward Carson, Lord Londonderry,
and Mr. Walter Long stood to take the salute before proceeding to the
stand which held the principal platform for the delivery of the
speeches. In the centre of the ground was a signalling-tower with a
flagstaff 90 feet high, on which a Union Jack measuring 48 feet by 25
and said to be the largest ever woven, was broken at the moment when the
Resolution against Home Rule was put to the meeting.
Mr. Bonar Law, visibly moved by the scene before him, made a speech that
profoundly affected his audience, although it was characteristically
free from rhetorical display. A recent incident in Dublin, where the
sight of the British Flag flying within view of a Nationalist meeting
had been denounced as "an intolerable insult," supplied him, when he
compared it with the spectacle presented by the meeting, with an apt
illustration of the contrast between "the two nations" in Ireland--the
loyal and the disloyal. He told the Ulstermen that he had come to them
as the leader of the Unionist Party to give them the assurance that
"that party regard your cause, not as yours alone, nor as ours alone,
but as the cause of the Empire"; the meeting, which he had expected to
be a great gathering but which far exceeded his expectation, proved
that Ulster's hostility to Home Rule, far from having slackened, as
enemies had alleged, had increased and solidified with the passing
years; they were men "animated by a unity of purpose, by a fixity of
resolution which nothing can shake and which must prove irresistible,"
to whom he would apply Cromwell's words to his Ironsides: "You are men
who know what you are fighting for, and love what you know." Then, after
an analysis of the practical evils that Home Rule would engender and the
benefits which legislative union secured, he again emphasised the lack
of mandate for the Government policy. His hearers, he said, "knew the
shameful story": how the Radicals had twice failed to obtain the
sanction of the British people for Home Rule, "and now for the third
time they were trying to carry it not only without the sanction, but
against the will, of the British people."
The peroration which followed made an irresistible appeal to a people
always mindful of the glories of the relief of Derry. Mr. Bonar Law
warned them that the Ministerial majority in the House of Commons, "now
cemented by £400 a year," could not be broken up, but would have their
own way. He therefore said to them:
"With all solemnity--you must trust in yourselves. Once again you
hold the pass--the pass for the Empire. You are a besieged city.
The timid have left you; your Lundys have betrayed you; but you
have closed your gates. The Government have erected by their
Parliament Act a boom against you to shut you off from the help of
the British people. You will burst that boom. That help will come,
and when the crisis is over men will say to you in words not unlike
those used by Pitt--you have saved yourselves by your exertions and
you will save the Empire by your example."
The overwhelming ovation with which Sir Edward Carson was received upon
taking the president's chair at the chief platform, in the absence
through illness of the Duke of Abercorn, proved that he had already won
the confidence and the affection of the Ulster people to a degree that
seemed to leave little room for growth, although every subsequent
appearance he made among them in the years that lay ahead seemed to add
intensity to their demonstrations of personal devotion. The most
dramatic moment at Balmoral--if for once the word so hackneyed and
misused by journalists may be given its true signification--the most
dramatic moment was when the Ulster leader and the leader of the whole
Unionist Party each grasped the other's hand in view of the assembled
multitude, as though formally ratifying a compact made thus publicly on
the eve of battle. It was the consummation of the purpose of this
assembly of the Unionist hosts on Ulster soil, and gave assurance of
unity of aim and undivided command in the coming struggle.
Of the other speeches delivered, many of them of a high quality,
especially, perhaps, those of Lord Hugh Cecil, Sir Robert Finlay, and
Mr. Scott Dickson, it is enough to say that they all conveyed the same
message of encouragement to Ulster, the same promise of undeviating
support. One detail, however, deserves mention, because it shows the
direction in which men's thoughts were then moving. Mr. Walter Long,
whose great services to the cause of the Union procured him a welcome
second in warmth to that of no other leader, after thanking Londonderry
and Carson "for the great lead they have given us in recent difficult
weeks "--an allusion to the Churchill incident that was not lost on the
audience--added with a blunt directness characteristic of the speaker:
"If they are going to put Lord Londonderry and Sir Edward Carson into
the dock, they will have to find one large enough to hold the whole
Unionist Party."
The Balmoral demonstration was recognised on all sides as one of the
chief landmarks in the Ulster Movement. The Craigavon policy was not
only reaffirmed with greater emphasis than before by the people of
Ulster themselves, but it received the deliberate endorsement of the
Unionist Party in England and Scotland. Moreover, as Mr. Long's speech
explicitly promised, and Mr. Bonar Law's speech unmistakably implied,
British support was not to be dependent on Ulster's opposition to Home
Rule being kept within strictly legal limits. Indeed, it had become
increasingly evident that opposition so limited must be impotent, since,
as Mr. Bonar Law pointed out, Ministers and their majority in the House
of Commons were in Mr. Redmond's pocket, and had no choice but to "toe
the line," while the "boom" which they had erected by the Parliament Act
cut off Ulster from access to the British constituencies, unless that
boom could be burst as the boom across the Foyle was broken by the
_Mountjoy_ in 1689. The Unionist leader had warned the Ulstermen that
in these circumstances they must expect nothing from Parliament, but
must trust in themselves. They did not mistake his meaning, and they
were quite ready to take his advice.
Coming, as it did, two days before the introduction of the Government's
Bill, the Balmoral demonstration profoundly influenced opinion in the
country. The average Englishman, when his political party is in a
minority, damns the Government, shrugs his shoulders, and goes on his
way, not rejoicing indeed, but with apathetic resignation till the
pendulum swings again. He now awoke to the fact that the Ulstermen meant
business. He realised that a political crisis of the first magnitude was
visible on the horizon. The vague talk about "civil war" began to look
as if it might have something in it, and it was evident that the
provisions of the forthcoming Bill, about which there had been so much
eager anticipation, would be of quite secondary importance since neither
the Cabinet nor the House of Commons would have the last word.
Supporters of the Government in the Press could think of nothing better
to do in these circumstances than to pour out abuse, occasionally varied
by ridicule, on the Unionist leaders, of which Sir Edward Carson came in
for the most generous portion. He was by turns everything that was bad,
dangerous, and absurd, from Mephistopheles to a madman. "F.C.G."
summarised the Balmoral meeting pictorially in a _Westminster Gazette_
cartoon as a costermonger's donkey-cart in which Carson, Londonderry,
and Bonar Law, refreshed by "Orangeade," took "an Easter Jaunt in
Ulster," and other caricaturists used their pencils with less humour and
more malice with the same object of belittling the demonstration with
ridicule. But ridicule is not so potent a weapon in England or in Ulster
as it is said to be in France. It did nothing to weaken the Ulster
cause; it even strengthened it in some ways. It was about this time that
hostile writers began to refer to "King Carson," and to represent him as
exercising regal sway over his "subjects" in Ulster. Those "subjects"
were delighted; they took it as a compliment to their leader's position
and power, and did not in the least resent the role assigned to
themselves.
On the other hand, they did resent very hotly the vulgar insolence often
levelled at their "Sir Edward." He himself was always quite indifferent
to it, sometimes even amused by it. On one occasion, when something
particularly outrageous had appeared with reference to him in some
Radical paper, he delighted a public meeting by solemnly reading the
passage, and when the angry cries of "Shame, shame" had subsided, saying
with a smile: "This sort of thing is only the manure that fertilises my
reputation with you who know me."
And that was true. If Home Rulers, whether in Ireland or in Great
Britain, ever seriously thought of conciliating Ulster, as Mr. Redmond
professed to desire, they never made a greater mistake than in saying
and writing insulting things about Carson. It only endeared him more and
more to his followers, and it intensified the bitterness of their
feeling against the Nationalists and all their works. An almost equally
short-sighted error on the part of hostile critics was the idea that the
attitude of Ulster as exhibited at Craigavon and Balmoral should be
represented as mere bluster and bluff, to which the only proper reply
was contempt. There never was anything further removed from the truth,
as anyone ought to have known who had the smallest acquaintance with
Irish history or with the character of the race that had supplied the
backbone of Washington's army; but, if there had been at any time an
element of bluff in their attitude, their contemptuous critics took the
surest means of converting it into grim earnestness of purpose. Mr.
Redmond himself was ill-advised enough to set an example in this
respect. In an article published by _Reynold's Newspaper_ in January he
had scoffed at the "stupid, hollow, and unpatriotic bellowings" of the
Loyalists in Belfast. Some few opponents had enough sense to take a
different line in their comments on Balmoral. One article in particular
which appeared in _The Star_ on the day of the demonstration attracted
much attention for this reason.
"We have never yielded," it said, "to the temptation to deride or
to belittle the resistance of Ulster to Home Rule.... The
subjugation of Protestant Ulster by force is one of those things
that do not happen in our politics.... It is, we know, a popular
delusion that Ulster is a braggart whose words are empty bluff. We
are convinced that Ulster means what she says, and that she will
make good every one of her warnings."
_The Star_ went on to implore Liberals not to be driven "into an
attitude of bitter hostility to the Ulster Protestants," with whom it
declared they had much in common.
After Balmoral there was certainly more disposition than before on the
part of Liberal Home Rulers to acknowledge the sincerity of Ulster and
the gravity of the position created by her opposition, and this
disposition showed itself in the debates on the Bill; but, speaking
generally, the warning of _The Star_ was disregarded by its political
adherents, and its neglect contributed not a little to the embitterment
of the controversy.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] _Annual Register_, 1912, p. 3.
[23] _The Times_, February 3rd, 1912.
[24] Ibid.
[25] _Annual Register_, 1912, p. 7.
[26] Ibid., p. 126.