an account of the understanding entered into with the King be- fore the last dissolution; pointed out that the Parliament bill had been twice approved by the electorate in principle and once in its substantial details, that there was no alternative Government possible and no responsible minister at its head would advise another general election with any hope of a different result. . The vote of censure was repelled by the usual Government majority; and, though Mr. Asquith's course had profoundly exasperated his opponents, the direct and unflinching manner in which he had carried his policy through raised his own parlia- mentary reputation and strengthened his Government.
Having cleared the way by the Parliament Act, which he described as " a landmark in political development," the Prime Minister pressed forward, by frequent use of the closure, in the three following sessions of 1912, 1913, and 1914 the two bills on which Liberal partisans had specially set their heart, the Irish Home Rule bill, and the Welsh Disestablishment bill. Of the Home Rule bill he took the main charge himself, ad- vocating it as being strictly in accordance with the spirit and tendency of imperial development. In July 1912 he went across to Dublin, and at a great Nationalist meeting in the Theatre Royal he described the intention of the Government to be to unite the English and Irish democracies. While speaking as a rule respectfully of Ulster, and offering to strengthen the safe- guards for her welfare contained in the bill, he resolutely refused, till the autumn of 1913, to consider the possibility of her exclusion even for a time. But after the signing of the Ulster covenant, the enrolment and drilling of thousands of volunteers, and the establishment by Sir Edward Carson of a " provisional Govern- ment " with none of which operations did he think it wise to interfere he realized that, unless Ulster were placated, the new Home Rule constitution could not be set up without something like civil war. Accordingly, at Ladybank, in Oct. 1913, he said that he desired a settlement by consent, and invited a frank interchange of views; but he stipulated that there must be a subordinate Irish Parliament and an executive responsible to it in Dublin, and that no insuperable bar must be erected to Irish unity. In pursuance of this policy, he announced early in the following March, when moving for the third time the second reading of the Home Rule bill, that the Government would propose that any county in Ulster might vote itself out of the bill for a period of six years. This did not at all satisfy the Unionists, who demanded that Ulster should be omitted till Parliament otherwise ordered. At this moment occurred the incident at the Curragh, where military officers, when questioned on their views, offered their resignations rather than undertake military operations against Ulster. The War Office prevailed on them to withdraw their resignations by an assurance that there was no intention of crushing political opposition to Home Rule; a kind of bargain which the Liberal party and the Liberal press vehemently condemned and the Government itself repudiated. General Seely, the War Minister, immediately resigned, and Mr. Asquith met this situation by himself as- suming the seals of the Secretary of State. He laid it down that it was not right to ask an officer what he would do in a remote and hypothetical contingency, still less could it be right for an officer to ask a Government to give him any assurance. Such a claim, once admitted, would put the Government and Parliament at the mercy of the military. He would administer the War Office, he told his constituents, in the spirit of Chatham, who said, " The army will hear nothing of politics from me, and in return I expect to hear nothing of politics from the army." These events raised passions on both sides, but the Prime Minister refused to be moved from his offer. The amending bill was introduced in the Lords, but was transformed by Unionist amend- ments into one for the permanent exclusion of Ulster a change which the Government refused to accept. Mr. Asquith then, in a final effort for settlement by consent, risked his popularity with Radicals and Labour men by advising the King to invite the leaders of the English and Irish parties to a small con- ference at Buckingham Palace. When this conference, too, after a four days' session, failed on July 24, he was relieved of his
difficulty as to the next step by the outbreak of the World War.
In no other domestic measures of his Government during this period had Mr. Asquith taken so prominent and personal a part as in the Parliament Act and the Home Rule bill. But he was, of course, mainly responsible for the drastic use of the closure, in various forms, without which, indeed, it might have been impossible to get the most contentious of the Government bills through at all. He was active in efforts, first to avert, and then to compose the great coal strike of the early spring of 1912. From the third week in Feb. till the middle of March he was in constant conference with both owners and miners; and when conciliation failed he finally introduced and passed a Coal- mines (minimum wage) bill, which brought about a settlement at Easter. With the transport strike in the summer of 1912 he declined to interfere. His various franchise bills came to naught owing to the difficulties introduced by the claim of a large body of women to the suffrage. Though he was prepared to leave that thorny question to be decided freely by the House, he was himself, unlike the majority of his colleagues, opposed to giving women the vote, and was, accordingly, in the last few years before the war, frequently subjected to rudeness and insult by the militant section of suffragists. While in the domestic legislation which he promoted, especially after he was compelled by his own party's electoral losses in 1910 to rely largely on Nationalist and Labour votes, Mr. Asquith leaned to the Radical side, in foreign and imperial policy and in matters of defence he acted up to the Liberal Imperialist principles of which he had been the standard- bearer while in opposition. He took a keen interest in his duties as chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence; he strongly supported Lord Haldane in his efforts to make the army more efficient as a striking force; he steadily backed first Mr. McKenna, and afterwards Mr. Churchill, in their extensive programmes, which increased the navy estimates from some 32,000,000 in 1908 to nearly 52,000,000 in 1914; he was the first Prime Minister to preside in a colonial, now become an imperial, conference; and while, owing to his Free-Trade principles, he rejected colonial or imperial preference, he pushed forward organized schemes for imperial defence. The experience of the World War, however, seemed to show that he made a mistake in accepting the Declaration of London. In foreign affairs he gave consistent and strenuous support to Sir Edward Grey, who had continued to develop the national policy previously laid down by Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne. This was fully recognized by the Opposition, who supported him on these questions against the sporadic attacks of Radicals, Nationalists, and Labour men. Whenever Mr. Asquith had to speak to the world as the nation's mouthpiece, in Parliament or at Guildhall, he produced a weighty impression by his clearness and candour in statement, and his dignified and sonorous phraseology.
When the world crisis came in the end of July 1914, he had to translate speech into action, with a hesitating Cabinet, and a still more hesitating party, behind him. He, like Sir Edward Grey, had been lulled into comparative optimism by the specious- ly reasonable attitude of Germany in the Balkan negotiations; and he was confronted by a strong section in the Cabinet, in- cluding Mr. Lloyd George, who at first refused to see cause, in the threat to France, for British armed intervention. On the other hand, he had the tender of support from the Unionists in continuation of their foreign policy since 1905. In the end, the violation of Luxemburg and Belgium by Germany solved all his difficulties, and enabled him to preserve his Cabinet intact save for the perhaps inevitable resignations of Lord Morley and Mr. Burns; but even before this happened it was becoming clear that he and Sir Edward Grey would take their stand by the side of France. His public language was eminently worthy of the occasion. On July 30 he told the House of Commons that the Amending bill must be postponed. The issues of peace and war, he said, were hanging in the balance; it was of vital importance that Great Britain, who had no direct interests at stake, should present a united front, and speak and act with the authority of an undivided nation. He left to the Foreign Secretary the duty of explaining the diplomatic position on Monday Aug. 3; but
