they are ready, in
what they believe to be the cause of justice and liberty, to lay down
their lives. How are you going to overcome that resistance? Do
Honourable Members believe that any Prime Minister could give orders to
shoot down men whose only crime is that they refuse to be driven out of
our community and be deprived of the privilege of British citizenship?
The thing is impossible. All your talk about details, the union of
hearts and the rest of it, is a sham. This is a reality. It is a rock,
and on that rock this Bill will inevitably make shipwreck."

The Unionist leader then made a searching exposure of the traffic and
bargaining between the Cabinet and the Nationalists by which the support
of the latter had been bought for a Budget which they hated, the price
paid being the Premier's improper advice to the Crown, leading to the
mutilation of the Constitution; the acknowledgment in the preamble to
the Parliament Act that an immediate reform of the Second Chamber was a
"debt of honour"; the omission to redeem that debt, which had provided a
new proverb--"Lying as a preamble"; and, finally, the determination to
carry Home Rule after deliberately keeping it out of sight during the
elections. The Prime Minister's "debt of honour must wait until he has
paid his debt of shame"; and the latter debt was being paid by the
proposals they were then debating. If those proposals had been submitted
to the electors, "there would be a difference," said Mr. Bonar Law,
"between the Unionists in England and the Unionists in Ireland. Now
there is none. We can imagine nothing which the Unionists in Ireland can
do which will not be justified against a trick of this kind."

Dissatisfaction with the financial clauses of the Bill was expressed at
once by the General Council of County Councils in Ireland, a purely
Nationalist body; but on the 23rd of April a Nationalist Convention in
Dublin, under the influence of Mr. Redmond's oratory, accepted the whole
of the Government's proposals with enthusiasm. The first and second
readings of the Bill were duly carried by the normal Government majority
of about a hundred Liberal, Labour, and Irish Nationalist votes, and the
committee stage opened on the 11th of June. On that day an amendment was
down for debate which required the most careful consideration by the
representatives of Ulster, since their attitude now might have an
important bearing on their future policy, and a false step at this s