r and
calm-minded a statesman as the former Liberal Foreign Secretary. The
root principles upon which Mr O'Brien and his friends proceeded from
the start were that success was to be had by making an Irish
settlement depend, in the first place, upon the co-operation of a
million of our Protestant countrymen, and next by enlisting the
co-operation of both British parties, instead of making the Irish
Question the exclusive possession of one English Party. These two
principles are now universally acknowledged to be the wise ones, yet
when we were urging them in the Home Rule debates we could find no
support from the Liberal-Irish cohorts, and although we sedulously
devoted ourselves to urging a non-party programme and the conciliation
of the Protestant minority--about which all parties are now agreed--we
only received vilification and calumny for our portion.

Great play is being made by distinguished converts within the past few
years of Dominion Rule as if they were the discoverers of this blessed
panacea for Ireland's ills, but it is proper to recall that the
All-for-Ireland Party specifically proposed Dominion Home Rule in a
letter to Mr Asquith in 1911 as the wisest of all solutions. Scant
attention was paid to our recommendation then and it is not even
remembered for us by the protagonists of a later time. In all our
efforts to conciliate Ulster and to allay the alarms it undoubtedly
felt owing to the growth and aggressiveness of the Catholic Order of
Orangeism, we never received encouragement or support from the
Government or the Irish Party. On the contrary, they denounced as
treason to Ireland the proposal made by us that for an experimental
term of five years the Ulster Party, which would remain in the
Imperial Parliament, should have the right of appeal as against any
Irish Bill of which they did not approve, the decision to be given
within one month. This, we held, would have been a more effectual
safeguard than any proposed since to satisfy Irish Unionists that
legislative oppression would have been impossible.

Other proposals of a representation in the Irish Parliament
proportioned to their numbers and of guarantees against the
establishment of any Tammany system of spoils in favour of the secret
sectarian association were also submitted. But all our overtures for a
peace based on reasonable concessions were repudiated by the official
Party and contemptuously rejected by them and we were held up to
public