en a margin over the cost of all Irish
services, though that margin had dwindled almost to vanishing-point. Old
Age Pensions completely turned the beam and left us in the position of
costing more than we contributed. Now the outlay on Insurance added half
a million a year to the balance against us.

Still, difficulties and perplexities were not limited to one side. The
Tory party were much divided since the crisis on the Parliament Act. A
section, and the most active section, had been violently opposed to the
surrender on the critical division, and these men were profoundly
discontented with Mr. Balfour's leadership; so Mr. Balfour, yielding to
intimations, suddenly resigned. Somewhat unexpectedly, Mr. Bonar Law was
chosen to succeed him, Mr. Long and Mr. Chamberlain waiving their
respective claims.

This choice was of sinister augury. Mr. Law did not know Ireland. But,
Canadian-born, he came from a country in which the Irish factions and
theological enmities had always had their counterpart; his father, a
Presbyterian Minister, came of Ulster stock. All the blood in him
instinctively responded to the tap of the Orange drum. As far back as
January 27, 1911, he had urged armed resistance to Home Rule.

This was a line which Mr. Balfour did not see his way to take, and
probably here rather than elsewhere lay the reason for the choice of Mr.
Bonar Law. The most active section of the Tory party--probably a
minority, for in such cases minorities decide--regarded the passing of
the Parliament Act as an outrage on the Constitution, which should be
resisted by any means, constitutional or unconstitutional. But no
possibility existed of mobilizing a force in Great Britain to fight for
the veto of the House of Lords, nor again did the resistance to a new
Franchise Act, or even to Welsh Disestablishment, promise to be
desperate. In one part only of these islands was there material for a
form of struggle in which the ballot-box and the division lobby might be
supplemented, if not replaced, by quite other methods of political war.
The Tory party saw in Ulster their best fighting chance. There was no
use in telling them that they jeopardized the British Constitution; from
their point of view the British Constitution--as they had known it--was
already gone; it was destroyed in principle and must be either restored
or refashioned according to their mind.

This temper, with the attitude towards parliamentary tradition which it
produ