Press had been successfully kept in the dark for
months regarding them, he had to admit that they had produced no result.
But there were, he said, "schemes and suggestions of settlement in the
air," among them the exclusion of Ulster from the Bill, a proposal on
which he would not at that moment "pronounce, or attempt to pronounce,
any final judgment", and he then announced that, as soon as the
financial business of the year was disposed of, he would bring forward
proposals for the purpose of arriving at an agreement "which will
consult not only the interests but the susceptibilities of all
concerned."

This appeared to be a notable change of attitude on the part of the
Government; but it was received with not a little suspicion by the
Unionist leaders. Whether or not the change was due, as Mr. William
Moore bluntly asserted, to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force,
which had now reached its full strength of 100,000 men, the question of
interest was whether the promised proposals would render that force
unnecessary. Mr. Austen Chamberlain asked why the Government's proposals
should be kept bottled up until a date suspiciously near All Fools' Day;
and Sir Edward Carson, in one of the most impressive speeches he ever
made in Parliament, which wrung from Mr. Lloyd George the acknowledgment
that it had "entranced the House," joined Chamberlain in demanding that
the country should not be kept in anxious suspense. The only proper way
of making the proposals known was, he said, by embodying them at once in
a Bill to amend the Home Rule Bill. He confirmed Chamberlain's statement
that nothing short of the exclusion of Ulster would be of the slightest
use. The Covenanters were not men who would have acted as they had done
for the sake of minor details that could be adjusted by "paper
safeguards," they were "fighting for a great principle and a great
ideal," and if their determination to resist was not morally justified
he "did not see how resistance could ever be justified in history at
all." But if the exclusion of Ulster was to be offered, he would
immediately go to Belfast and lay the proposal before his followers. He
did not intend "that Ulster should be a pawn in any political game," and
would not allow himself to be manoeuvred into a position where it could
afterwards be said that Ulster had resorted to arms to secure something
that had been rejected when offered by legislation. The sympathy of
Ulstermen with Loyali