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 c