The Prime Minister's "debt of honour must wait until he has paid his debt of shame"; and the latter debt was being paid by the proposals they were then debating.

If those proposals had been submitted to the electors, "there would be a difference," said Mr.Bonar Law, "between the Unionists in England and the Unionists in Ireland.

Now there is none.

We can imagine nothing which the Unionists in Ireland can do which will not be justified against a trick of this kind." Dissatisfaction with the financial clauses of the Bill was expressed at once by the General Council of County Councils in Ireland, a purely Nationalist body; but on the 23rd of April a Nationalist Convention in Dublin, under the influence of Mr.Redmond's oratory, accepted the whole of the Government's proposals with enthusiasm.

The first and second readings of the Bill were duly carried by the normal Government majority of about a hundred Liberal, Labour, and Irish Nationalist votes, and the committee stage opened on the 11th of June.