WHAT WILL MR. ASQUITH DO?

Free Lance, Volume XIV, Issue 722, 2 May 1914, Page 6

WHAT WILL MR. ASQUITH DO?

The Need of a Firm Hand in Seditious Ulster. MR. Asquith declares now' that thelaw shall be vindicated in U1 T ster. It is fully time. For months and years past Unionist leaders in that part of the world have been making seditious speeches and elaborating plans for civil war. In permitting this sort of thing to go on, flagrant and unchecked, Mr. Asquith has shown weakness without parallel. But 'now—now that Ulster is running arms and flatly defying Imperial law —there is • no time . for further vacillation and pretence. Mr. Asquith must go oh or go out. He knows better than any man that the Unionist propaganda is chiefly a matter of rank hypocrisy and opportunism. The average English Unionist does not care twopence about Ulster. merely uses Ulster as a convenience— ~ point from which . he attack and heckle the Liberal Government. The Unionists are not fighting Ireland's battle —Ireland is the paltriest matter "■of their concern : they are national insurance and old-age pensions, and the liberties of the people: they are defending class-privilege and parasitic wealth and the demands of an arrogant plutocracy. The honest Unionists — poor zealots who go mad at the merest mention of the Catholic religion—are a very small body, an anachronism altogether negligible.