rders issued have been
punctually and implicitly obeyed." This was an hour or two after his
interview with the generals who had been summoned from Ireland to be
dismissed for refusal to obey orders.

But Mr. Bonar Law had his own information, which was much fuller than
the Government imagined. A long and heated debate followed Colonel
Seely's statement, and was continued on the two following days,
gradually dragging to light the facts with a much greater profusion of
detail than is necessary for this narrative. On the 24th Mr. L.S. Amery
made a speech which infuriated the Radicals and Labour members, but the
speaker, as was his intention, made them quite as angry with the
Government as with himself. The cause of offence was that the Government
was thought to have allowed itself to be coerced by the soldiers, while
the latter had been allowed to make their obedience to orders contingent
on a bargain struck with the Government. This aspect of the case was
forcibly argued by Mr. J. Ward, the Labour member for Stoke, in a speech
greatly admired by enthusiasts for "democratic" principles. Although Mr.
Ward's invective was mainly directed against the Unionist Opposition,
the latter listened to it with secret pleasure, perceiving that it was
in reality more damaging to the Government than to themselves, since
Ministers were forced into an attitude of defence against their own
usually docile supporters. It may here be mentioned that at a much later
date, when Mr. John Ward, in the light of experience gained by his own
distinguished service as an officer in the Great War, had come to the
conviction that "the possibility of forcing Ulster within the ambit of a
Dublin Parliament has now become unthinkable," he acknowledged that in
1914 the only way by which Mr. Asquith's Home Rule Act could have been
enforced was through and by the power of the Army.[77]

So much shaken were the Government by these attacks that on the next
day, the 25th of March, Colonel Seely, at the end of a long narrative of
the transaction, announced his resignation from the Government. He had,
he said, unintentionally misled his colleagues by adding without their
knowledge to the paper given to General Gough; the Cabinet as a whole
was quite innocent of the great offence given to democratic sentiment.
This announcement having had the desired effect of relieving the
Ministry as a whole from responsibility for the "peccant paragraphs,"
and averting Radical wra