obloquy as proposing to subject Ireland to the veto of fourteen
Orangemen.

In the early stages of the opposition to Home Rule, curiously enough
Sir Edward Carson did not count as a figure of any particular power or
malignancy. True, he had his early period of notoriety in Ireland when
he acted as a Crown Prosecutor under the Crimes Act. But when he
transferred his legal and political ambition to England it is alleged
that he was for a season a member of the National Liberal Club and was
thus entitled to be ranked as a Liberal in politics. Whether through
conviction or otherwise, his allegiance appears to have been promptly
and permanently transferred to the Unionist Party, but even then he
was in no sense regarded as an Ulster Member--he is himself a Southern
Irishman by birth--and in the House of Commons comported himself as a
good Unionist, holding office as such. It was only when the Irish
Party set their faces sternly against any concessions to Ulster that
Sir Edward Carson stepped into the breach and came to the front as the
duly elected leader of the Ulster Party. It is the sheerest nonsense
and pure ignorance of the facts to say that Sir Edward Carson created
the Ulster difficulty. It was created by the statesmen and politicians
who, in the words of Viscount Grey, "did not sufficiently realise the
absolute necessity of taking into consideration the feeling of
Ulster." When the full history of this period is written, and when
documents at present confidential are available, I believe it will be
shown that if the concessions and safeguards suggested by the
All-for-Ireland Party had been offered by the Government or the Irish
Party in the earlier stages of the Home Rule controversy they would
have been, in the main, acceptable to Ulster Unionist opinion. I well
remember Mr (now Mr Justice) Moore declaring, from his place on the
Ulster benches:

"My friends and myself have always marvelled at the fatuity of the
Irish Party in throwing over the member for the City of Cork (Mr
William O'Brien) when he had all the cards in his hands."

Where we preached all reasonable concession and conciliation our
opponents proclaimed that Ulster must submit itself unconditionally to
the law and that it must content itself in the knowledge that
"minorities must suffer." And all this while the Board of Erin
Hibernians were consolidating their position as the ascendant
authority in Irish life, from whom the Protestant minority might