We Unionists have told them from the beginning that quite
apart from the Imperial argument, they cannot make a workable scheme of Irish Home Rule without doing a cruel wrong and injustice to North-East Ulster, or else making a Bill which no cne in Ireland would want. Therefore we assert that the status quo of the Union holds the field and is as much now as it was in Pitt's time the only possible way of adjusting the political relations between the two islands. We are glad to see that Mr. Asquith did not venture to use the absurdly fallacious argument that if North-East Ulster is accorded separate treatment, Ulster and the Unionist Party as a whole must pretend that their other vital arguments against Home Rule cease to have weight and force. The omission of North-East Ulster, as we have said so often before, would not make a bad Bill into a good one, but merely relieve a bad Bill of the added horror of civil war. If a man contemplates murder as well as burglary and we try to persuade him at least to forgo the crime of Cain what should we say if he made it a condition to his yielding as regards the murder that we assented to the burglary, and must be held to be partners is the lesser crime?
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