, less assured than his subordinate at the Board of
Trade that "King Carson" was negligible, also displayed a somewhat
chastened spirit at Ladybank on the 25th of October, when he
acknowledged that it was "of supreme importance to the future well-being
of Ireland that the new system should not start with the apparent
triumph of one section over another," and he invited a "free and frank
exchange of views."[52] Sir Edward Grey held out another little twig of
olive two days later at Berwick.

To these overtures, if they deserve the name, Mr. Bonar Law replied in
an address to a gathering of fifteen thousand people at Wallsend on the
29th, in the presence of Sir Edward Carson. Having repeated the Blenheim
pledge, he praised the discipline and restraint shown by the Ulster
people and their leaders, but warned his hearers that the nation was
drifting towards the tragedy of civil war, the responsibility for which
would rest on the Government. He expressed his readiness to respond to
Mr. Asquith's invitation, but pointed out that there were only three
alternatives open to the Government. They must either (1) go on as they
were doing and provoke Ulster to resist--that was madness; (2) they
could consult the electorate, whose decision would be accepted by the
Unionist Party as a whole; or (3) they could try to arrange a settlement
which would at least avert civil war.

There had been during the past six or eight months an unusual dearth of
by-elections to test public opinion in regard to the Irish policy of the
Government, and it must be borne in mind that the Unionist Party in
Great Britain was still distracted by disputes over the Tariff question,
which in January 1913 had very nearly led to the retirement of Mr. Bonar
Law from the leadership. Nevertheless, in May the Unionists won two
signal victories, one in Cambridgeshire, and one in Cheshire, where the
Altrincham Division sent a staunch friend of Ulster to Parliament in the
person of Mr. George C. Hamilton, who in his maiden speech declared that
he had won the contest entirely on the Ulster Question. Even more
significant, perhaps, were two elections which were fought while the
interchange of party strokes over the Loreburn letter was in progress,
and the results of both were declared on the 8th of November. At
Reading, where the Unionists retained the seat, the Liberal candidate
was constrained by pressure of opinion in the constituency to promise
support for a policy of