The time limit would keep the fever of political agitation at a high temperature for six years, and at the end of that period forcible resistance would be as necessary as ever, while in the interval all administration would be paralysed by the unworkable nature of the system to be introduced for six years.

Although there were other gross blots on the scheme outlined by the Prime Minister, yet, if the time limit were dropped, Carson said he would submit it to a convention in Belfast; but he utterly declined to do so if the time limit was to be retained.
The debate was adjourned indefinitely, and before it could be resumed the whole situation was rendered still more grave by the events to be narrated in the next chapter, and by a menacing speech delivered by Mr.
Churchill at Bradford on the 14th of March.

He hinted that, if Ulster persisted in refusing the offer made by the Prime Minister, which was the Government's last word, the forces of the Crown would have to be employed against her; there were, he said, "worse things than bloodshed even on an extended scale"; and he ended by saying, "Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof."[63] Two days later Mr.Asquith, in answer to questions in the House of Commons, announced that no particulars of the Government scheme would be given unless the principle of the proposals were accepted as a basis of agreement.
The leader of the Unionist Party replied by moving a vote of censure on the Government on the 19th of March.

Mr.Churchill's Bradford speech, and one no less defiant by Mr.Devlin the day following it, had charged with inflammable material the atmosphere in which the debate was conducted.

Sir Edward Carson began his speech by saying that, after these recent events, "I feel that I ought not to be here, but in Belfast." There were some sharp passages between him and Churchill, whom he accused of being anxious to provoke the Ulster people to make an attack on the soldiers.