Page:The Irish Cause and "The Irish Convention".djvu/3



The Prime Minister's proposals are contained in two apparently water-tight compartments: The first is the Bill which the Government offered to introduce based on the severance of six Irish counties from the body of Ireland, and that offer could only be met by an immediate and unchangeable negative on the part of the Irish people. You may abuse Longford as much as you like, but Longford has shot the fox—Longford has killed Partition so far as the Nationalists of Ireland are concerned. The alternative plan which now, after the Prime Minister's speech, remains the only one—the plan of referring to Irishmen themselves the drafting of a Constitution for Ireland—is one which, if it had been adopted six or seven years ago by the Government, must to a certainty have led to a happy settlement so far as anything human is certain. That offer is one which, even now at the half-past eleventh hour, ought not to be dismissed by any man in this House, and especially by any Irishman, without grave and anxious deliberation.

Unfortunately the speech of the Hon. Baronet (Sir John Lonsdale), the leader of the Unionist Party, makes it only too plain that the Partition proposals of the Government, as to which neither of 3