it is true that the latter recommended itself mostly to the least prominent of its members, such as Mr. J.M.  Robertson, Secretary of the Board of Trade, who in a speech at Newcastle on the 25th of September announced scornfully that Ministers were not going to turn “King Carson” into “Saint Carson” by prosecuting him, and that “the Government would know how to deal with him."[50] But more important Ministers were beginning to perceive the unwisdom of this sort of bluster.  Lord Morley, in the House of Lords, denied that he had ever underrated the Ulster difficulty, and said that for twenty-five years he had never thought that Ulster was guilty of bluff.  Mr. Churchill, at Dundee, on the 9th of October, no longer talked as he had the previous year about “not taking Sir Edward Carson too seriously,” though he still appeared to be ignorant of the fact that there was in Ulster anybody except Orangemen.  “The Orange Leaders,” he said, “used violent language, but Liberals should try to understand their position.  Their claim for special consideration, if put forward with sincerity, could not be ignored by a Government depending on the existing House."[51]

The Prime Minister, less assured than his subordinate at the Board of Trade that “King Carson” was negligible, also displayed a somewhat chastened spirit at Ladybank on the 25th of October, when he acknowledged that it was “of supreme importance to the future well-being of Ireland that the new system should not start with the apparent triumph of one section over another,” and he invited a “free and frank exchange of views."[52] Sir Edward Grey held out another little twig of olive two days later at Berwick.

To these overtures, if they deserve the name, Mr. Bonar Law replied in an address to a gathering of fifteen thousand people at Wallsend on the 29th, in the presence of Sir Edward Carson.  Having repeated the Blenheim pledge, he praised the discipline and restraint shown by the Ulster people and their leaders, but warned his hearers that the nation was drifting towards the tragedy of civil war, the responsibility for which would rest on the Government.  He expressed his readiness to respond to Mr. Asquith’s invitation, but pointed out that there were only three alternatives open to the Government.  They must either (1) go on as they were doing and provoke Ulster to resist—­that was madness; (2) they could consult the electorate, whose decision would be accepted by the Unionist Party as a whole; or (3) they could try to arrange a settlement which would at least avert civil war.

There had been during the past six or eight months an unusual dearth of by-elections to test public opinion in regard to the Irish policy of the Government, and it must be borne in mind that the Unionist Party in Great Britain was still distracted by disputes over the Tariff question, which in January 1913 had very nearly led to the retirement of Mr. Bonar Law from the leadership.  Nevertheless, in May the Unionists