Ulster's Stand For Union

by Ronald McNeill

CHAPTER XIV

LORD LOREBURN'S LETTER

Whatever might be the state of public opinion in England, it was realised that the Government, if they chose, were in a position to disregard it; and in Ulster the tension was becoming almost unbearable. The leaders were apprehensive lest outbreaks of violence should occur, which they knew would gravely prejudice the movement; and there is no doubt that it was only the discipline which the rank and file had now gained, and the extraordinary restraining influence which Carson exercised, that prevented serious rioting in many places. Incidents like the attack by Nationalist roughs in Belfast on a carriage conveying crippled children to a holiday outing on the 31st of May because it was decorated with Union Jacks might at any moment lead to trouble. There was some disorder in Belfast in the early hours of the 12th of July; and an outbreak occurred in August in Derry, always a storm centre, when a procession was attacked, and a Protestant was shot while watching it from his own upper window. The incident started rioting, which continued for several days, and a battalion of troops had to be called in to restore order.

Meantime, throughout the summer, while the Government were complacently carrying their Bill through Parliament for the second time, the Press was packed with suggestions for averting the crisis which everybody except the Cabinet recognised as impending.

It began to be whispered in the clubs and lobbies that the King might exercise the prerogative of veto, and even men like Lord St. Aldwyn and the veteran Earl of Halsbury, both of them ex-Cabinet Ministers, encouraged the idea; but there was no widespread acceptance of the notion that even in so exceptional a case His Majesty would reject the advice of his responsible Ministers. But in a letter to The Times on the 4th of September, Mr. George Cave, K.C., M.P. (afterwards Home Secretary, and ultimately Lord of Appeal), suggested that the King might "exercise his undoubted right" to dissolve Parliament before the beginning of the next session, in order to inform himself as to whether the policy of his Ministers was endorsed by the people.

But a much greater sensation was created a few days later by a letter which appeared in The Times on the 11th of the same month over the signature of Lord Loreburn. Lord Loreburn had been Lord Chancellor at the time the Home Rule Bill was first introduced, but had retired from the Government in June 1912, being replaced on the Woolsack by Lord Haldane. When the first draft of the Home Rule Bill was under discussion in the Cabinet in preparation for its introduction in the House of Commons, two of the younger Ministers, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill, proposed that an attempt should be made to avert the stern opposition to be expected from Ulster, by treating the northern Province, or a portion of it, separately from the rest of Ireland. This proposal was not acceptable to the Cabinet as a whole, and its authors were roundly rated by Lord Loreburn for so unprincipled a lapse from orthodox Gladstonian doctrine. What, therefore, must have been the astonishment of the heretics when they found their mentor, less than two years later, publicly reproving the Government which he had left for having got into such a sad mess over the Ulster difficulty! They might be forgiven some indignation at finding themselves reproved by Lord Loreburn for faulty statesmanship of which Lord Loreburn was the principal author.

Those, however, who had not the same ground for exasperation as Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill thought Lord Loreburn's letter very sound sense. He pointed out that if the Bill were to become law in 1914, as it stood in September 1913, there would be, if not civil war, at any rate very serious rioting in the North of Ireland, and when the riots had been quelled by the Government the spirit that prompted them would remain. Everybody concerned would suffer from fighting it out to a finish. The Ex-Chancellor felt bound to assume that "up to the last, Ministers, who assuredly have not taken leave of their senses, would be willing to consider proposals for accommodation," and he therefore suggested that a Conference should be held behind closed doors with a view to a settlement by consent. If Lord Loreburn had perceived at the time the draft Bill was before the Cabinet that it was not the Ministers who proposed separate treatment for Ulster who had "taken leave of their senses," but those, including himself, who had resisted that proposal, his wisdom would have been more timely; but it was better late than never, and his unexpected intervention had a decided influence on opinion in the country.

The comment of The Times was very much to the point:

"On the eve of a great political crisis, it may be of national disaster, a distinguished Liberal statesman makes public confession of his belief that, as a permanent solution, the Irish policy of the Government is indefensible."

This letter of the ex-Lord Chancellor gave rise to prolonged discussion in the Press and on the platform. At Durham, on the 13th of September, Carson declared that he would welcome a Conference if the question was how to provide a genuine expansion of self-government, but that, if Ulster was to be not only expelled from the Union but placed under a Parliament in Dublin, then "they were going to make Home Rule impossible by steady and persistent opposition." The Government seemed unable to agree whether a conciliatory or a defiant attitude was their wiser policy, though it is true that the latter recommended itself mostly to the least prominent of its members, such as Mr. J.M. Robertson, Secretary of the Board of Trade, who in a speech at Newcastle on the 25th of September announced scornfully that Ministers were not going to turn "King Carson" into "Saint Carson" by prosecuting him, and that "the Government would know how to deal with him."[^[50]] But more important Ministers were beginning to perceive the unwisdom of this sort of bluster. Lord Morley, in the House of Lords, denied that he had ever underrated the Ulster difficulty, and said that for twenty-five years he had never thought that Ulster was guilty of bluff. Mr. Churchill, at Dundee, on the 9th of October, no longer talked as he had the previous year about "not taking Sir Edward Carson too seriously," though he still appeared to be ignorant of the fact that there was in Ulster anybody except Orangemen. "The Orange Leaders," he said, "used violent language, but Liberals should try to understand their position. Their claim for special consideration, if put forward with sincerity, could not be ignored by a Government depending on the existing House."[^[51]]