PASSING THE BILL
No part of Great Britain displayed a more constant and whole-hearted
sympathy with the attitude of Ulster than the city of Liverpool. There
was much in common between Belfast and the great commercial port on the
Mersey. Both were the home of a robust Protestantism, which perhaps was
reinforced by the presence in both of a quarter where Irish Nationalists
predominated. Just as West Belfast gave a seat in Parliament to the most
forceful of the younger Nationalist generation, Mr. Devlin, the Scotland
Division of Liverpool had for a generation been represented by Mr. T.P.
O'Connor, one of the veteran leaders of the Parnellite period. In each
case the whole of the rest of the city was uncompromisingly
Conservative, and among the members for Liverpool at the time was Mr.
F.E. Smith, unquestionably the most brilliant of the rising generation
of Conservatives, who had already conspicuously identified himself with
the Ulster Movement, and was a close friend as well as a political
adherent of Carson. Among local leaders of opinion in Liverpool Alderman
Salvidge exercised a wide and powerful influence on the Unionist side.
It was in accordance with the fitness of things, therefore, that
Liverpool should have wished to associate itself in no doubtful manner
with the men who had just subscribed to the Covenant on the other side
of the Channel. Having left Belfast amid the wonderful scenes described
in the last chapter, Carson, Londonderry, F.E. Smith, Beresford, and the
rest of the distinguished visitors awoke next morning--if the rollers of
the Irish Sea permitted sleep--in the oily waters of the Mersey, to find
at the landing-stage a crowd that in dimensions and demeanour seemed to
be a duplicate of the one they had left outside the dock gates at
Belfast. Except that the point round which everything had centred in
Belfast, the signing of the Covenant, was of course missing in
Liverpool, the Unionists of Liverpool were not to be outdone by the
Ulstermen themselves in their demonstration of loyalty to the Union.
The packet that carried the group of leaders across the Channel happened
to be, appropriately enough, the R.M.S. _Patriotic_. As she steamed
slowly up the river towards Prince's Landing-stage in the chilly
atmosphere of early morning it was at once evident that more than the
members of the deputation who had arranged to present addresses to
Carson were out to welcome him to Liverpool, and when the workers who
thronged the river bank started singing "O God, our help in ages past,"
the sound was strangely familiar in ears fresh from Ulster.
An address from the Unionist working men of Liverpool and district,
presented by Alderman Salvidge, thanked Carson for his "magnificent
efforts to preserve the integrity of the Empire," and assured him that
they, "Unionist workers of the port which is connected with Belfast in
so many ways, stand by Ulster in this great struggle." Scenes of intense
enthusiasm in the streets culminated in a monster demonstration in Shiel
Park, at which it was estimated that close on 200,000 people were
present. In all the speeches delivered and the resolutions adopted
during this memorable Liverpool visit the same note was sounded, of full
approval of the Covenanters and of determination to support them
whatever might befall.
The events of the last three months, and especially the signing of the
Covenant, had concentrated on Ulster the attention of the whole United
Kingdom, not to speak of America and the British oversea Dominions. This
was not of unmixed advantage to the cause for which Ulster was making so
determined a stand. There was a tendency more and more to regard the
opposition to Irish Home Rule as an Ulster question, and nothing else.
The Unionist protagonists of the earlier, the Gladstonian, period of the
struggle, men like Salisbury, Randolph Churchill, Devonshire,
Chamberlain, and Goschen, had treated it mainly as an Imperial question,
which it certainly was. In their eyes the Irish Loyalists, of whom the
Ulstermen were the most important merely because they happened to be
geographically concentrated, were valuable allies in a contest vital to
the safety and prosperity of the British Empire; but, although the
particular interests of these Loyalists were recognised as possessing a
powerful claim on British sympathy and support, this was a consideration
quite secondary in comparison with the larger aspects of Imperial policy
raised by the demand for Home Rule. It was an unfortunate result of the
prominence into which Ulster was forced after the introduction of Mr.
Asquith's measure that these larger aspects gradually dropped away, and
the defence of the Union came to be identified almost completely in
England and Scotland with support of the Ulster Loyalists. It was to
this aspect of the case that Mr. Kipling gave prominence in the poem
published on the day of the Balmoral meeting,[40] although no one was
less prone than he to magnify a "side-show" in Imperial policy; and it
was the same note that again was sounded on the eve of the Covenant by
another distinguished English poet. The general feeling of bewilderment
and indignation that the only part of Ireland which had consistently
upheld the British connection should now be not only thrown over by the
British Government but denounced for its obstinate refusal to co-operate
in a separatist movement, was finely expressed in Mr. William Watson's
challenging poem, "Ulster's Reward," which appeared in _The Times_ a few
days before the signing of the Covenant in Belfast:
"What is the wage the faithful earn?
What is a recompense fair and meet?
Trample their fealty under your feet--
That, is a fitting and just return.
Flout them, buffet them, over them ride,
Fling them aside!
"Ulster is ours to mock and spurn,
Ours to spit upon, ours to deride.
And let it be known and blazoned wide
That this is the wage the faithful earn:
Did she uphold us when others defied?
Then fling her aside.
"Where on the Earth was the like of it done
In the gaze of the sun?
She had pleaded and prayed to be counted still
As one of our household through good and ill,
And with scorn they replied;
Jeered at her loyalty, trod on her pride,
Spurned her, repulsed her,
Great-hearted Ulster;
Flung her aside."
Appreciating to the full the sympathy and support which their cause
received from leading men of letters in England, it was not the fault of
the Ulstermen themselves that the larger Imperial aspects of the
question thus dropped into the background. They continually strove to
make Englishmen realise that far more was involved than loyal support of
England's only friends in Ireland; they quoted such pronouncements as
Admiral Mahan's that "it is impossible for a military man, or a
statesman with appreciation of military conditions, to look at a map and
not perceive that if the ambition of the Irish Separatists were
realised, it would be even more threatening to the national life of
Britain than the secession of the South was to that of the American
Republic.... An independent Parliament could not safely be trusted even
to avowed friends"; and they showed over and over again, quoting chapter
and verse from Nationalist utterances, and appealing to acknowledged
facts in recent and contemporary history, that it was not to "avowed
friends," but to avowed enemies, that Mr. Asquith was prepared to
concede an independent Parliament.
But those were the days before the rude awakening from the dream that
the world was to repose for ever in the soft wrappings of universal
peace. Questions of national defence bored Englishmen. The judgment of
the greatest strategical authority of the age weighed less than one of
Lord Haldane's verbose platitudes, and the urgent warnings of Lord
Roberts less than the impudent snub administered to him by an
Under-Secretary. Speakers on public platforms found that sympathy with
Ulster carried a more potent appeal to their audience than any other
they could make on the Irish question, and they naturally therefore
concentrated attention upon it. Liberals, excited alternately to fury
and to ridicule by the proceedings in Belfast, heaped denunciation on
Carson and the Covenant, thereby impelling their opponents to vehement
defence of both; and the result of all this was that before the end of
1912 the sun of Imperial policy which had drawn the homage of earlier
defenders of the Union was almost totally eclipsed by the moon of
Ulster.
When Parliament reassembled for the autumn session in October the Prime
Minister immediately moved a "guillotine" resolution for allotting time
for the remaining stages of the Home Rule Bill, and, in resisting this
motion, Mr. Bonar Law made one of the most convincing of his many
convincing speeches against the whole policy of the Bill. It stands for
all time as the complete demonstration of a proposition which he argued
over and over again--that Home Rule had never been submitted to the
British electorate, and that that fact alone was full justification for
Ulster's resolve to resist it. It was impossible for any democratic
Minister to refute the contention that even if the principle of the
Government's policy had been as frankly submitted to the electorate as
it had in fact been carefully withheld, it would still remain true that
the intensity of the Ulster opposition was itself a new factor in the
situation upon Which the people were entitled to be consulted. There was
a limit, said Mr. Bonar Law, to the obligation to submit to legally
constituted authority, and that limit was reached "in a free country
when a body of men, whether they call themselves a Cabinet or not,
propose to make a great change like this for which they have never
received the sanction of the people."
It was, however, thoroughly understood by every member of the House of
Commons that argument, no matter how irrefutable, had no effect on the
situation, which was governed by the simple fact that the life of the
Ministry depended on the good-will of the Nationalist section of the
Coalition, which rigorously demanded the passage of the Bill in the
current session, and feared nothing so much as the judgment of the
English people upon it. Consequently, under the guillotine, great blocks
of the Bill, containing the most far-reaching constitutional issues,
and matters vital to the political and economic structure of the centre
of the British Empire, were passed through the House of Commons by the
ringing of the division bells without a word of discussion, exactly as
they had come from the pen of the official draftsman, and destined under
the exigencies of the Parliament Act procedure to be forced through the
Legislature in the same raw condition in the two following sessions.
This last-mentioned fact suggested a consideration which weighed heavily
on the minds of the Ulster leaders as the year 1912 drew to a close, and
with it the debates on the Bill in Committee. Had the time come when
they ought to put forward in Parliament an alternative policy to the
absolute rejection of the Bill? They had not yet completely abandoned
hope that Ministers, however reluctantly, might still find it impossible
to stave off an appeal to the country; but the opposite hypothesis was
the more probable. If the Bill became law in its present form they would
have to fall back on the policy disclosed at Craigavon and embodied in
the Covenant. But, although it is true that they had supported Mr.
Agar-Robartes's amendment to exclude certain Ulster counties from the
jurisdiction to be set up in Dublin, the Ulster representatives were
reluctant to make proposals of their own which might be misrepresented
as a desire to compromise their hostility to the principle of Home Rule.
Under the Parliament Act procedure, however, they realised that no
material change would be allowed to be made in the Bill after it first
left the House of Commons, although two years would have to elapse
before it could reach the Statute-book; if they were to propound any
alternative to "No Home Rule" it was, therefore, a case of now or never.
Having regard to the extreme gravity of the course to be followed in
Ulster in the event of the measure passing into law, it was decided that
the most honest and straightforward thing to do was to put forward at
the juncture now reached a policy for dealing with Ulster separately
from the rest of Ireland. But in fulfilment of the promise, from which
he never deviated, to take no important step without first consulting
his supporters in Ulster, Carson went over to attend a meeting of the
Standing Committee in Belfast on the 13th of December, where he
explained fully the reasons why this policy was recommended by himself
and all his parliamentary colleagues. It was not accepted by the
Standing Committee without considerable discussion, but in the end the
decision was unanimous, and the resolution adopting it laid it down that
"in taking this course the Standing Committee firmly believes the
interests of Unionists in the three other provinces of Ireland will be
best conserved." In order to emphasise that the course resolved upon
implied no compromise of their opposition to the Bill as a whole, Sir
Edward Carson wrote a letter to the Prime Minister during the Christmas
recess, which was published in the Press, and which made this point
clear; and he pressed it home in the House of Commons on the 1st of
January, 1913, when he moved to exclude "the Province of Ulster" from
the operation of the Bill in a speech of wonderfully persuasive
eloquence which deeply impressed the House, and which was truly
described by Mr. Asquith as "very powerful and moving," and by Mr.
Redmond as "serious and solemn."
Carson's proposal was altogether different from what was subsequently
enacted in 1920. It was consistent with the uninterrupted demand of
Ulster to be let alone, it asked for no special privilege, except the
privilege, which was also claimed as an inalienable right, to remain a
part of the United Kingdom with full representation at Westminster and
nowhere else; it required the creation of no fresh subordinate
constitution raising the difficult question as to the precise area which
its jurisdiction could effectively administer.
Carson's amendment was, of course, rejected by the Government's
invariably docile majority, and on the 16th of January the Home Rule
Bill passed the third reading in the House of Commons, without the
smallest concession having been made to the Ulster opposition, or the
slightest indication as to how the Government intended to meet the
opposition of a different character which was being organised in the
North of Ireland.
When the Bill went to the Upper House at the end of January the whole
subject was threshed out in a series of exceedingly able speeches; but
the impotence of the Second Chamber under the Parliament Act gave an air
of pathetic unreality to the proceedings, which was neatly epitomised by
Lord Londonderry in the sentence: "The position is, that while the House
of Commons can vote but not speak, the Lords can speak but not vote."
Nevertheless, such speeches as those of the Archbishop of York, Earl
Grey, the Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Londonderry, were not without
effect on opinion outside. Earl Grey, an admitted authority on federal
constitutions, urged that if, as the Government were continually
assuring the country, Home Rule was the first step in the federalisation
of the United Kingdom, there was every reason why Ulster should be a
distinct unit in the federal system. The Archbishop dealt more fully
with the Ulster question. Admitting that he had formerly believed "that
this attitude of Ulster was something of a scarecrow made up out of old
and outworn prejudices," he had now to acknowledge that the men of
Ulster were "of all men the least likely to be 'drugged with the wine of
words,' and were men who of all other men mean and do what they say."
Behind all the glowing eloquence of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Redmond, he
discerned "this figure of Ulster, grim, determined, menacing, which no
eloquence can exorcise and no live statesmanship can ignore." If the
result of this legislation should be actual bloodshed, then, on
whomsoever might rest the responsibility for it, it would mean the
shattering of all the hopes of a united and contented Ireland which it
was the aim of the Bill to create. If Ulster made good her threat of
forcible resistance there was, said the Archbishop, one condition, and
one condition only, on which her coercion could be justified, and that
was that the Government "should have received from the people of this
country an authority clear and explicit" to carry it out.
But among the numerous striking passages in the debate which occupied
the Peers for four days, none was more telling than Lord Curzon's
picturesque description of how Ulster was to be treated. "You are
compelling Ulster," he said, "to divorce her present husband, to whom
she is not unfaithful, and you compel her to marry someone else whom she
cordially dislikes, with whom she does not want to live; and you do it
because she happens to be rich, and because her new partner has a large
and ravenous offspring to provide for. You are asking rather too much of
human nature."
That the Home Rule Bill would be rejected on second reading by the Lords
was a foregone conclusion, and it was so rejected by a majority of 257
on the 31st of January, 1913. The Bill then entered into its period of
gestation under the Parliament Act. The session did not come to an end
until the 7th of March, and the new session began three days afterwards.
It is unnecessary to follow the fortunes of the Bill in Parliament in
1913, for the process was purely mechanical, in order to satisfy the
requirements of the Parliament Act. The preparations for dealing with
the mischief it would work went forward with unflagging energy
elsewhere.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] See _ante_, p. 79.