Whether or not the change was due, as Mr.William Moore bluntly asserted, to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which had now reached its full strength of 100,000 men, the question of interest was whether the promised proposals would render that force unnecessary.

Mr.Austen Chamberlain asked why the Government's proposals should be kept bottled up until a date suspiciously near All Fools' Day; and Sir Edward Carson, in one of the most impressive speeches he ever made in Parliament, which wrung from Mr.Lloyd George the acknowledgment that it had "entranced the House," joined Chamberlain in demanding that the country should not be kept in anxious suspense.

The only proper way of making the proposals known was, he said, by embodying them at once in a Bill to amend the Home Rule Bill.

He confirmed Chamberlain's statement that nothing short of the exclusion of Ulster would be of the slightest use.

The Covenanters were not men who would have acted as they had done for the sake of minor details that could be adjusted by "paper safeguards," they were "fighting for a great principle and a great ideal," and if their determination to resist was not morally justified he "did not see how resistance could ever be justified in history at all." But if the exclusion of Ulster was to be offered, he would immediately go to Belfast and lay the proposal before his followers.