polished
phrases against the "cumbrous, costly, unworkable scheme," earned many
cheers from his followers, and the even greater tribute of interruptions
from his opponents. For a moment he was pulled up, when to his rhetorical
question, "What has Home Rule meant to us?" some graceless Coalitionist
promptly answered, "Votes!" but he soon got going again. Ireland, he
declared, was a unit. The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background
of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and
bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the
Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we
don't trust _you_," came the swift reply from Sir EDWARD CARSON.

Mr. ASQUITH'S own remedy for Irish unrest was to take the Act of 1914 and
transform it into something like Dominion Home Rule. Any county--Ulster or
Sinn Fein--that voted against coming under the Dublin Parliament should be
left under the present administration.

Mr. BONAR LAW did not fail to point out the inconsistency of condemning the
Government scheme for its complexity and then immediately proposing another
which would involve not one but a dozen partitions and make the political
map of Ireland look like a crazy quilt. He advised the House to reject Mr.
ASQUITH'S advice and pass the Bill, even though it should have the
paradoxical result, for the moment, of leaving Nationalist Ireland under
British administration while providing Unionist Ulster with a Home Rule
Parliament for which it has never asked.

I suppose Mr. DEVLIN is not like the Sinn Feiners, who, according to "T.
P.," are so contemptuous of the Bill that they have never read a line of
it. Parts of his speech, and particularly his peroration, seemed far more
suitable to a Coercion Bill than to a measure which is designed, however
imperfectly, to grant Home Rule to Ireland. The Nationalist leader may be
forgiven a great deal, however, for his inimitable description of Lord
ROBERT CECIL as "painfully struggling into the light with one foot in the
Middle Ages."

_Wednesday, March 31st._--The third and last Act of the Home Rule drama was
the best. Nothing in the previous two days' debate--not even Mr. BONAR
LAW'S ruthless analysis of the Paisley policy for Ireland--gripped the
audience so intensely as Sir EDWARD CARSON'S explanation of the Ulster
attitude. He declared that the Union had not failed in Ulster, and would
not have failed anywhere