First Lord of the Admiralty, at
that time one of the most vital in the Government. Colonel James Craig
also joined the Ministry as Treasurer of the Household.

The change of Government did nothing to alter the attitude of the
Nationalists, unless, indeed, the return of Carson to high office added
to the fierceness of their attacks. On the 26th of February 1917--just
when "unrestricted submarine warfare" was bringing the country into its
greatest peril--Mr. Dillon called upon the Government to release
twenty-eight men who had been deported from Ireland, and who were
declared by Mr. Duke, the Chief Secretary, to have been deeply
implicated in the Easter rebellion of the previous year; and a week
later Mr. T.P. O'Connor returned to the charge with another demand for
Home Rule without further ado.

The debate on Mr. O'Connor's motion on the 7th of March was made
memorable by the speech of Major William Redmond, home on leave from the
trenches in France, whose sincere and impassioned appeal for oblivion of
old historic quarrels between Irish Catholics and Protestants, who were
at that moment fighting and dying side by side in France, made a deep
impression on the House of Commons and the country. And when this
gallant officer fell in action not long afterwards and was carried out
of the firing line by Ulster soldiers, his speech on the 7th of March
was recalled and made the peg on which to hang many adjurations to
Ulster to come into line with their Nationalist fellow-countrymen of the
South.

Such appeals revealed a curious inability to grasp the realities of the
situation. Men spoke and wrote as if it were something new and wonderful
for Irishmen of the "two nations" to be found fighting side by side in
the British Army--as if the same thing had not been seen in the
Peninsula, in the Crimea, on the Indian frontier, in South Africa, and
in many another fight. Ulstermen, like everybody else who knew Major
Redmond, deplored the loss of a very gallant officer and a very lovable
man. But they could not understand why his death should be made a reason
for a change in their political convictions. When Major Arthur O'Neill,
an Ulster member, was killed in action in 1914, no one had suggested
that Nationalists should on that account turn Unionists. Why, they
wondered, should Unionists any more turn Nationalists because a
Nationalist M.P. had made the same supreme sacrifice? All this
sentimental talk of that time was founded on