EXCLUSION AND CIVIL WAR.
NOTHING has yet been made public in regard to the conversations which are going on between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. All the signs, however, point to their turning, as we have always held they must turn, not merely upon the question of the exclusion of Ulster, but its exclusion for a special and particular purpose. There is not and cannot be any conversion of the Unionists to the break-up of the Union, or any attempt to induce the Liberals to abandon their Home Rule Bill. The immediate and specific purpose in view is simple and definite—the avoiding of civil war. It is a matter of high expediency and nothing else. The arguments for or against Home Rule remain good or ill as before. Our readers will, no doubt, have already noted that we have never talked about Home Rule being settled " by consent." What we have said is that civil war can be avoided by exclusion, even if the Liberals insist on passing this Bill before, and not after, a general election. Consent does not come into our proposal— except consent to abandon civil war. Again, we have nothing to say as to federalism, devolution, or any compromise of that nature. We have always held, and still hold, such arrangements to be entirely incompatible with Unionist principles, and also, we presume, with Nationalist principles. We have not been on the look-out for a solution of the Irish problem, for in our opinion the only solution exists in the Union, but for a solution of a problem of much narrower though of imperative importance, the avoidance of civil war. We therefore whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Austen Chamberlain in warning his hearers, as he did last Wednesday, that the -Ulster question is not the whole Irish question, and in pointing out that if you exclude Ulster you must not think you have thereby secured agreement upon the whole matter. Of course, you have done nothing of the kind. All we claim for exclusion is that it avoids civil war. But in the pass that we have come to that is the essential matter. The cutting out of North-East Ulster from the Bill, and nothing else, is what will prevent civil war at the. present moment. And here let us remark for the hundredth time that our insistence upon exclusion must not be mistaken for any belief that it is an arrangement good per se. We agree fully that it is not that, and that either a general election or, better still, a Referendum would be greatly to he preferred. We, however, are practical politicians, not theorists, and we have got to face the fact that the Government, moved by the strongest passion that can move politicians or, indeed, mankind, that is fear, have, for the present at any rate, refused absolutely to give us either a general election or a Referendum. We are therefore driven back to the only other course which can prevent civil war—the exclusion of North-East Ulster. It is the only path not closed by the Government, and therefore we have urged on them that it must be taken. Exclusion, of course, must be real and bona fide and not a sham. Again, it must not be coupled with any factitious conditions in regard to solving the Home Rule question by consent. On the hypothesis that Home Rule in the rest of Ireland is going to prove a success, no consent will be needed. If, on the other hand, it is not a success, so-called consent by Unionists will not work a miracle and save the Home Rule Act from failure. Exclusion, to prevent civil war, must be true exclusion and not merely "special treatment " for Ulster. To that Ulstermen will not consent, and rightly, and therefore it is not worth discussing. Such a plan would not do what it set out to do, i.e., to avoid civil war. The only modification of exclusion which will not still leave the door open for civil war is the proposal to call it temporary. No Unionists could agree to the auEomatic inclusion of Ulster after a term of say five or six years. On the other hand, no Unionist will object to North-East Ulster having the option of voluntarily going under a Dublin Parliament after a period of five, of ten, or of a hundred years. Such a condition is immaterial, and there would be no more objection, in our opinion, to its applying to the Plantation counties than to the county of Somerset or to Sutherland
1 shire. As long as exclusion is given bond fide we have not the slightest objection to it being labelled " temporary." Before we leave the subject of exclusion it may be as well to deal with some of the objections which seem to haunt the minds of a portion of the public.
(1) The first objection usually made is that the Ulster people do not want it. Of course they do not—any more than we want it or any other Unionist wants it per se. What we all want is the incorporating Union, and what we detest is its being broken up. There is, however, something which we must all detest even more, and that is civil war. But the Government, through the Parliament Act, have the power to .bring civil war upon Ulster and upon us without our being able to prevent it. The Ulster people have told us in unmistakable terms again and again that though they do not ask for the exclusion of North-East Ulster, if it takes place, i.e., if North-East Ulster is exempted from the area to which the Bill applies, they are not going to fight. At the very striking gathering of business men in Ulster this view was stated by Mr. Stirling, a director of the York Street Flax Spinning Company, the Belfast business man who was put forward to move one of the chief resolutions. Here is a summary of what Mr. Stirling said, taken from the Times : " They took up no ' dog-in-the-manger' attitude as regards the satisfaction of the claims of other parts of Ireland, but they made one reservation—that, whatsoever the final settlement for others might be, for them it would not be government by a Parliament in Dublin." But what was even more important than his actual words is the fact that you may search the report of the proceedings from beginning to end without finding the slightest repudiation of Mr. Stirling's point of view. As an Ulster man put it in conversation : " If we are excluded we may not like it and we may grumble, but we shall not fight, for there will be nothing to fight about. We Ulstermen do not want to get ourselves shot any more than do any other body of men. Though we will willingly give our lives to prevent our being placed under a Dublin Parliament, we are not going to give them merely to prevent the passage of a bad Bill which does not affect us."
(2) The second objection is that the exclusion of Ulster would be a cruel wrong to the minority in the South. That objection was met by a Southern Unionist in our correspondence columns last week. He pointed out that civil war is the very worst thing that could happen to the Southern Protestants and Loyalists. It would lead to reprisals from which no power on earth could protect them. No doubt if we or the Ulster people could by any other means defeat the Bill, this plea of desertion would be sound and must be hearkened to. On the assumption, however—inevitable in the circumstances—that we have not the power to prevent the Bill going through, we are not betraying but protecting the Southern minority by doing our best to avoid that civil war which must, if it comes, be their complete undoing. (3) A third objection to the policy of exclusion is that the Government will not really agree to it and that Mr. Winston Churchill's offer was a sham offer. To this we can only say that all the evidence is against this view. Mr. Winston Churchill's offer has never been repudiated by the Prime Minister or by any Minister in the inner Cabinet. To show how strongly it holds the field we have only to quote what was said on Wednesday by Sir S. 0. Buckmaster, the Solicitor-General, at Keighley. "If," he said, "Ulster would accept exemption for a limited period, but would afterwards come in, he would be prepared to urge the acceptance of this as a final solution." If this means, as we have no doubt it does, what Mr. Winston Churchill called " temporary " exclusion, then it is useless to say that the Government will not accept exclusion. It is true that if the Solicitor-General's words are read with minute literalness it may be urged that in the phrase, "but would afterwards come in," he takes away with one hand what he gives with the other. We do not believe, however, that his choice of words was dictated by anything more subtle than by a desire to save the face of the Nationalists. It is clear that no one would be in a position to promise what. shall be done by Ulstermen in five or ten years' time. All that the Government could ask, and all that the Ulstermen or the Unionists on their behalf could promise, would be that the question shall be "reconsidered" in five or tea years' time. Automatic inclusion which might mean automatic civil war is clearly wholly out of the question. We
may take it definitely, therefore, that the Government does not bar out the bond -fide exclusion of Ulster.
(4) A fourth objection is that the leaders of the Opposition, whatever may be the attitude of their followers, will not agree to exclusion. We see nothing in any of their public utterances which in the very least supports this view. The evidence is all the other way. No doubt, for diplomatic reasons, they have not said much about the matter in public, mainly because of the difficulties of defining the area of exclusion, but we ask our readers to note that not one of them has ever repudiated the proposal for exclusion. If they held that exclusion was inadmissible they must, after the speech of Mr. F. E. Smith, have denounced it. As a matter of fact, as we have seen in the words used by Mr. Austen Chamberlain on Wednesday and referred to above, they have done the .very reverse. Like wary negotiators they have not given themselves away on the point, but they have never barred it out. Note, too, that Sir Edward Carson, though he stood on the same platform and listened to Mr. F. E. Smith's proposal for the exclusion of the " homogeneous Ulster," has never warned the country that he and his followers would not in any circumstances accept exclusion. But this he would, nay must, have done—for he is above all things an honest man—if he had made up his mind that even if North-East Ulster was excluded he and his friends would provoke civil war in order to prevent the Bill applying to the rest of Ireland.
(5) A fifth objection which is used in regard to the policy of exclusion is one which shows a curious want of reasoning power in those who use it. It is to the effect that the Nationalists will not accept exclusion, and that therefore apparently Unionists have no right to ask for it as something better than civil war. Conceivably the Nationalists will not accept it. But even if this is the case, surely it is not the business of Unionists to bring such an objection forward. After all, if the Nationalists were to reject exclusion after the Government had been induced to accept it, the only result would be that the Bill would be lost. Is that a conclusion which Unionists dread so much that they should refuse to urge or even agree to exclusion ? To use the convenient phrase of the lawyers, Unionists are estopped from urging this objection. And here for fear of mistake let us say that we are not urging exclusion merely as a wrecking proposal. We should, of course, be wanting in candour if we did not say that if the result were to wreck the Bill we should be well pleased. That would be a piece of good luck we could not refuse. We are, however, not proposing anything which, if it were accepted by the Government, would place us in the position of being caught in our own trap. We face the situation perfectly openly when we urge exclusion. If the acceptance of that policy by the Government ultimately leads to the withdrawal of the Bill, well and good. If, on the other hand, it leads to the passage of the Bill—which, remember, on our assumption we cannot now prevent—but leads to its passage without causing civil war, we shall still be gainers, even though on a reduced scale. Remember always that our essential object is the avoidance of civil war. The rejection of exclusion by the Nationalists is an affair which must be settled between the Government and their allies and not by us. All we can do, and all that it is our duty to do as good citizens, is to help the Government to avoid shedding the blood of our fellow citizens in the name of local autonomy.
(6) With the objection that Unionists by urging exclusion on the Government, in order to prevent civil war, are abandoning the chief principle of Unionism, we shall deal very shortly. In truth, we find it difficult to be patient with a plea so muddle-headed. As well might it be said that you accept as sound all the principles of a faulty and dangerous engine because you urge on the builder the need of providing a safety-valve to prevent the worst type of explosion. To do that is not to abandon sound principles as regards the rest of the machine, but merely to try to minimize the danger. A teetotaller does not abandon his principles when he urges upon a man who insists on one bottle the folly of doubling his dose of alcohol. (7) The final objection that is made is that we are not offering the Government anything, not paying them, as it were, anything as compensation for their kindness and
generosity in giving up their hold upon North-East Ulster, and not exercising their right to shoot down the Ulster Protestants. We might easily meet this objection by asking why the Government should want to be paid by Unionists or anybody else for doing their duty —the duty of governing without civil war. We will not, however, put the matter so controversially. We fully admit that in one sense we have nothing to give the Government, nothing to bargain with. That this is so is indeed the essence of the whole situation. The Government, under the Parliament Bill, theoretically needs no compromise. They have the power to go ahead with their Bill and carry every line and every word of it, and not to reek in the least whether it will mean the taking of a thousand or ten thousand lives in Ulster to carry it through. They are complete autocrats in the matter. They have but to say the word and civil war is upon us. All Unionists can do is to point out that civil war must be the result if the Bill passes in its present shape, and, further, to point out the way in which civil war can be avoided. That we have done, and that is not only all the Government can expect us to do, but all, if they consider the matter carefully, that we can do. We cannot say to them, "If you will agree to exclusion we will allow your Bill to pass." That would no doubt be a bargain, but it would b3 bargaining with something we have not got to give. The Government have the power of the giant. All we can do is to point out that it would not only be base to use that power like a giant, but that it would bring on them the most appalling punishment that can fall on any body of statesmen—the punishment which comes sooner or later to those who shed the blood of their countrymen without adequate cause—the punishment which fell on Danton and on Robespierre. Imagine the position next July. Imagine the state of mind of the men who, while giving the order to shoot down the Ulstermen, will remember that they could have avoided giving that order by the simple expedient of granting exclusion to North-East Ulster, and yet that out of fear of Mr. Devlin they did not grant it.
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