pondents had asked why he did not
challenge the Nationalist professions of loyalty two years before at the
beginning of the war, which had since then been so signally falsified,
he answered:

"Because I had no desire to show a dissentient Ireland to the
Germans. I am glad, even with what has happened, that we played the
game, and if we had to do it again we would play the game. And then
suddenly came the rebellion in Dublin. I cannot find words to
describe my own horror when I heard of it. For I am bound to admit
to you that I was not thinking merely of Ulster; I was thinking of
the war; I was thinking, as I am always thinking, of what will
happen if we are beaten in the war. I was thinking of the
sacrifice of human lives at the front, and in Gallipoli, and at
Kut, when suddenly I heard that the whole thing was interrupted by,
forsooth, an Irish rebellion--by what Mr. Dillon in the House of
Commons called a clean fight! It is not Ulster or Ireland that is
now at stake: it is the British Empire. We have therefore to
consider not merely a local problem, but a great Imperial
problem--how to win the war."

He then outlined the representations that had been made to him by the
Cabinet as to the injury to the Allied cause resulting from the
unsettled Irish question--the disturbance of good relations with the
United States, whence we were obtaining vast quantities of munitions;
the bad effect of our local differences on opinion in Allied and neutral
countries. He admitted that these evil effects were largely due to false
and hostile propaganda to which the British Government weakly neglected
to provide an antidote; he believed they were grossly exaggerated. But
in time of war they could not contend with their own Government nor be
deaf to its appeals, especially when that Government contained all their
own party leaders, on whose support they had hitherto leaned.

One of Carson's chief difficulties was to make men grasp the
significance of the fact that Home Rule was now actually established by
Act of Parliament. The point that the Act was on the Statute-book was
constantly lost sight of, with all that it implied. He drove home the
unwelcome truth that simple repeal of that Act was not practical
politics. The only hope for Ulster to escape going under a Parliament in
Dublin lay in the promised Amending Bill. But they had no assurance how
much that Bil