NEWS OF THE WEEK.
ON Wednesday Mr. Winston Churchill addressed his con- stituents at Dundee in a speech which we trust will prove to be of historic importance. We have dealt at length elsewhere with his virtual offer to agree to the exclusion of North-East Ulster provided that the Protestants, while claiming the right to say what Parliament and Executive they themselves shall live under, do not also claim the right to enforce their views upon the rest of Ireland. The great thing to remember in the crisis of the moment is that Unionists are not . trying to improve the Government Bill or to devise the best system for regulating the relations between the two islands, but are merely facing the instant need of preventing civil war. What they have to consider is how to prevent the whole fabric of the State catching fire, not whether the proposed alterations in one wing are badly planned and likely to prove uncomfortable or even dangerous. To vary our metaphor, our object BOW is to prevent an irritant poison of the most deadly kind being administered to the patient, not merely to prohibit the prescribing of an injurious and debilitating quack medicine.
