Ulster's Stand For Union

by Ronald McNeill

"Ulster is ours to mock and spurn,
Ours to spit upon, ours to deride.
And let it be known and blazoned wide
That this is the wage the faithful earn:
Did she uphold us when others defied?
Then fling her aside.

"Where on the Earth was the like of it done
In the gaze of the sun?
She had pleaded and prayed to be counted still
As one of our household through good and ill,
And with scorn they replied;
Jeered at her loyalty, trod on her pride,
Spurned her, repulsed her,
Great-hearted Ulster;
Flung her aside."

Appreciating to the full the sympathy and support which their cause received from leading men of letters in England, it was not the fault of the Ulstermen themselves that the larger Imperial aspects of the question thus dropped into the background. They continually strove to make Englishmen realise that far more was involved than loyal support of England's only friends in Ireland; they quoted such pronouncements as Admiral Mahan's that "it is impossible for a military man, or a statesman with appreciation of military conditions, to look at a map and not perceive that if the ambition of the Irish Separatists were realised, it would be even more threatening to the national life of Britain than the secession of the South was to that of the American Republic.... An independent Parliament could not safely be trusted even to avowed friends"; and they showed over and over again, quoting chapter and verse from Nationalist utterances, and appealing to acknowledged facts in recent and contemporary history, that it was not to "avowed friends," but to avowed enemies, that Mr. Asquith was prepared to concede an independent Parliament.

But those were the days before the rude awakening from the dream that the world was to repose for ever in the soft wrappings of universal peace. Questions of national defence bored Englishmen. The judgment of the greatest strategical authority of the age weighed less than one of Lord Haldane's verbose platitudes, and the urgent warnings of Lord Roberts less than the impudent snub administered to him by an Under-Secretary. Speakers on public platforms found that sympathy with Ulster carried a more potent appeal to their audience than any other they could make on the Irish question, and they naturally therefore concentrated attention upon it. Liberals, excited alternately to fury and to ridicule by the proceedings in Belfast, heaped denunciation on Carson and the Covenant, thereby impelling their opponents to vehement defence of both; and the result of all this was that before the end of 1912 the sun of Imperial policy which had drawn the homage of earlier defenders of the Union was almost totally eclipsed by the moon of Ulster.

When Parliament reassembled for the autumn session in October the Prime Minister immediately moved a "guillotine" resolution for allotting time for the remaining stages of the Home Rule Bill, and, in resisting this motion, Mr. Bonar Law made one of the most convincing of his many convincing speeches against the whole policy of the Bill. It stands for all time as the complete demonstration of a proposition which he argued over and over again—that Home Rule had never been submitted to the British electorate, and that that fact alone was full justification for Ulster's resolve to resist it. It was impossible for any democratic Minister to refute the contention that even if the principle of the Government's policy had been as frankly submitted to the electorate as it had in fact been carefully withheld, it would still remain true that the intensity of the Ulster opposition was itself a new factor in the situation upon Which the people were entitled to be consulted. There was a limit, said Mr. Bonar Law, to the obligation to submit to legally constituted authority, and that limit was reached "in a free country when a body of men, whether they call themselves a Cabinet or not, propose to make a great change like this for which they have never received the sanction of the people."

It was, however, thoroughly understood by every member of the House of Commons that argument, no matter how irrefutable, had no effect on the situation, which was governed by the simple fact that the life of the Ministry depended on the good-will of the Nationalist section of the Coalition, which rigorously demanded the passage of the Bill in the current session, and feared nothing so much as the judgment of the English people upon it. Consequently, under the guillotine, great blocks of the Bill, containing the most far-reaching constitutional issues, and matters vital to the political and economic structure of the centre of the British Empire, were passed through the House of Commons by the ringing of the division bells without a word of discussion, exactly as they had come from the pen of the official draftsman, and destined under the exigencies of the Parliament Act procedure to be forced through the Legislature in the same raw condition in the two following sessions.

This last-mentioned fact suggested a consideration which weighed heavily on the minds of the Ulster leaders as the year 1912 drew to a close, and with it the debates on the Bill in Committee. Had the time come when they ought to put forward in Parliament an alternative policy to the absolute rejection of the Bill? They had not yet completely abandoned hope that Ministers, however reluctantly, might still find it impossible to stave off an appeal to the country; but the opposite hypothesis was the more probable. If the Bill became law in its present form they would have to fall back on the policy disclosed at Craigavon and embodied in the Covenant. But, although it is true that they had supported Mr. Agar-Robartes's amendment to exclude certain Ulster counties from the jurisdiction to be set up in Dublin, the Ulster representatives were reluctant to make proposals of their own which might be misrepresented as a desire to compromise their hostility to the principle of Home Rule. Under the Parliament Act procedure, however, they realised that no material change would be allowed to be made in the Bill after it first left the House of Commons, although two years would have to elapse before it could reach the Statute-book; if they were to propound any alternative to "No Home Rule" it was, therefore, a case of now or never.

Having regard to the extreme gravity of the course to be followed in Ulster in the event of the measure passing into law, it was decided that the most honest and straightforward thing to do was to put forward at the juncture now reached a policy for dealing with Ulster separately from the rest of Ireland. But in fulfilment of the promise, from which he never deviated, to take no important step without first consulting his supporters in Ulster, Carson went over to attend a meeting of the Standing Committee in Belfast on the 13th of December, where he explained fully the reasons why this policy was recommended by himself and all his parliamentary colleagues. It was not accepted by the Standing Committee without considerable discussion, but in the end the decision was unanimous, and the resolution adopting it laid it down that "in taking this course the Standing Committee firmly believes the interests of Unionists in the three other provinces of Ireland will be best conserved." In order to emphasise that the course resolved upon implied no compromise of their opposition to the Bill as a whole, Sir Edward Carson wrote a letter to the Prime Minister during the Christmas recess, which was published in the Press, and which made this point clear; and he pressed it home in the House of Commons on the 1st of January, 1913, when he moved to exclude "the Province of Ulster" from the operation of the Bill in a speech of wonderfully persuasive eloquence which deeply impressed the House, and which was truly described by Mr. Asquith as "very powerful and moving," and by Mr. Redmond as "serious and solemn."

Carson's proposal was altogether different from what was subsequently enacted in 1920. It was consistent with the uninterrupted demand of Ulster to be let alone, it asked for no special privilege, except the privilege, which was also claimed as an inalienable right, to remain a part of the United Kingdom with full representation at Westminster and nowhere else; it required the creation of no fresh subordinate constitution raising the difficult question as to the precise area which its jurisdiction could effectively administer.

Carson's amendment was, of course, rejected by the Government's invariably docile majority, and on the 16th of January the Home Rule Bill passed the third reading in the House of Commons, without the smallest concession having been made to the Ulster opposition, or the slightest indication as to how the Government intended to meet the opposition of a different character which was being organised in the North of Ireland.