sts in other parts of Ireland was as deep and
sincere as ever, but no one had ever supposed that Ulster could by force
of arms do more than preserve her own territory from subjection to
Dublin. As for the Nationalists, they would never succeed in coercing
Ulster, but "by showing that good government can come under Home Rule
they might try and win her over to the case of the rest of Ireland."
That was a plan that had never yet been tried.

The significance of the announcement which Mr. Asquith had now made lay
in the fact that it was an acknowledgment by the Government for the
first time that there was an "Ulster Question" to be dealt with--that
Ulster was not, as had hitherto been the Liberal theory, like any other
minority who must submit to the will of the majority opposed to it, but
a distinct community, conditioned by special circumstances entitling it
to special treatment. The Prime Minister had thus, as Mr. Bonar Law
insisted, "destroyed utterly the whole foundation on which for the last
two years the treatment extended to Ulster in this Bill has been
justified." From that day it became impossible ever again to contend
that Ulster was merely a recalcitrant minority in a larger unity,
without rights of her own.

The speeches of the Unionist leaders in the House of Commons showed
clearly enough how little faith they had that the Government intended to
do anything that could lead to an agreed settlement. The interval that
passed before the nature of the Government's proposals was made known
increased rather than diminished this distrust. The air was full of
suggestions, the most notable of which was put forward by the veteran
constitutional lawyer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, who proposed that Ulster
should be governed by a separate committee elected by its own
constituencies, with full legislative, administrative, and financial
powers, subject only to the Crown and the Imperial Parliament.[61]
Unionists did not believe that the Liberal Cabinet would be allowed by
their Nationalist masters to offer anything so liberal to Ulster; nor
did that Province desire autonomy for itself. They believed that the
chief desire of the Government was not to appease Ulster, but to put her
in a tactically indefensible position. This fear had been expressed by
Lord Lansdowne as long before as the previous October, when he wrote
privately to Carson in reference to Lord Loreburn's suggested Conference
that he suspected the intention of the G