I have given the speech almost in full as it stands in print after the opening paragraph.  But I cannot give the effect of what was heard by a densely crowded House in absolute silence.  It was not an argument; it was an appeal.  There was not a cheer, not a murmur of agreement.  They were not needed, they would have been felt an impertinence, so great was the respect and the sympathy.  As the speaker stood there in war-stained khaki, his hair showed grey, his face was seamed with lines, but there was in every word the freshness and simplicity of a nature that age had not touched.  In his usual place on the upper bench beside his brother, he poured out his words with the flow and passion of a bird’s song.  He was out of the sphere of argument; but the whole experience of a long and honourable lifetime was vibrant in that utterance.  He spoke from his heart.  All that had gone to make his faith, all the inmost convictions of his life were implicit—­and throughout all ran the sense in the assembly who heard him, not only that he had risked, but that he was eager to give his life for proof.  It was not strange that this should be so, for he was going on what he believed would be his last journey to France; and when he reached the supreme moment of his passion with the words “In the name of God, we here who are about to die, perhaps,” the last word was little more than a concession to the conventions.

It was a speech, in short, that made one believe in impossibilities; but in Parliament no miracles happen.  Mr. Lloyd George replied, as John Redmond expected—­declaring that the Government were willing to give Home Rule at once to “the parts of Ireland which unmistakably demand it,” but would be no party to placing under Nationalist rule people who were “as alien in blood, in religious faith, in traditions, in outlook from the rest of Ireland as the inhabitants of Fife or Aberdeen.”  No Liberal Minister had ever before so completely adopted the Ulster theory of two nations.  Taxed with the refusal to allow Ulster counties to declare by vote which group they belonged to, he declined to discuss “geographical limitations” at present, but indicated that if Irish members could accept the principle of separate treatment for two peoples, there were “ways and means by which it could be worked out.”  Suggestion of a Conference of Irishmen was thrown out, or of a Commission to discuss the details of partition.  Redmond, in replying, answered to this that “after experience of the last negotiations he would enter into no more negotiations.”  He warned the Government that the whole constitutional movement was in danger.  There were in Ireland “serious men, men of ability, men with command of money,” who were bent on smashing it.

“After fifty years of labour on constitutional lines we had practically banished the revolutionary party from Ireland.  Now again, after fifty years, it has risen.”

The rest was a prophecy only too accurate: