the
attitude of the House of Lords and of all those social influences whose
power we had felt so painfully. Government could undoubtedly, if it
chose, carry a measure giving effect to this compact.

Further, weighing greatly with the instincts of the rank and file was
the motive which prompted Irish Nationalists to welcome the advance made
by those whom Lord Midleton represented. The Southern Unionists were the
old landowning and professional class, friendly in all ways of
intercourse, but politically severed and sundered from the mass of the
population. Now, they came forward with an offer to help in attaining
our desire--quite frankly, against their own declared conviction that
the Union was the best plan, but with an equally frank recognition that
the majority was the majority and was honest in its intent. The
personality of the men reinforced the effect of this: Lord Oranmore, for
instance, whom most of them had only known by anti-Home Rule speeches in
the House of Lords, revealed himself as the friendliest of Irishmen,
with the Irish love for a witty phrase.

This temperamental attitude was of help to Lord Midleton when on
December 18th he expounded the position of himself and his friends in a
very powerful argument, the more persuasive because the good will in his
audience softened his habitual touch of contentiousness. It had seemed
to them, he said, that both in the Nationalist and Northern Unionist
camp there was a tendency to consider dispositions out of doors and to
conciliate certain antagonisms without considering whether they excited
others. He and his friends had determined to fix their minds solely on
the Convention itself, and to pursue the purpose for which they were
summoned of endeavouring after agreement within that body. They were
Unionists; but they had asked themselves what could be removed from the
present system without disturbing the essence of Union; and in that
effort they would go to the extremest limit in their power, without
thought of conciliating opinions outside, and without any attempt to
bargain.

On one point only he indicated that their scheme was tentative. Defence
was by consent of all left to the Imperial Parliament. This implied, he
held, an adequate contribution, and the yield of customs to be collected
by the Imperial Parliament seemed roughly to meet the case, for the
period of the war. But this was not absolutely a hard-and-fast proposal.
In any case, after the war, the