With the close of the session of 1913 there came a brief lull, and during the recess conversations with the Opposition leaders were opened by Asquith, who throughout preserved an attitude of patience and forbearance. It will always be matter for contro versy whether, when the policy of violent resistance had been adopted, he was justified in ignoring so direct a challenge to con stitutional government. His natural disposition was to allow the utmost scope for the play of discussion and the influence of the time element ; but it is an open secret that he would have taken up the challenge but for the persuasions of John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, who believed that the prosecution of the Ulster leaders would prejudice the prospects of friendly relations with Ulster when Home Rule was actually on the statute book. In any case, the conversations of the autumn were futile, and on March 9, 1914, the Government announced the provisions of their amending bill, their last word of compromise. The chief provision of this bill was that any county in the north of Ireland was to be allowed to vote itself out of the operation of Home Rule for a period of five years.
The offer was rejected by the Opposition and now events rushed forward to an apparently unavoidable catastrophe. On the night of April 24-25, 55,000 rifles were landed at Larne from a German port for the use of the Ulster army. On the other side of the border the Nationalists were beginning to enrol a volunteer army and to make counter-preparations. Meanwhile a more sinister menace appeared. In the debate on the vote of censure on the Government on March 19 Bonar Law, speaking on the Home Rule issue, had used the ominous phrase "soldiers are citizens like the rest of us." There had been much talk of disaffection in the army in regard to the coercion of Ulster, and on March 20 it took shape in the Curragh incident (see IRELAND; IRELAND, NORTHERN), which led to the resignation of Col. Seely, the secretary for war. For a moment it seemed that the loyalty of the army was im perilled and the situation that confronted the Government looked desperate. But the announcement by Asquith next day that he would assume the secretaryship for war created a profound im pression in parliament and stopped for the time being, at all events, what had seemed like a riot in the army. Following the mutilation of the amending bill by the House of Lords and Sir Edward Carson's challenge to the Government to "give us a clean cut or come and fight us," the king, on Asquith's advice, summoned a conference at Buckingham Palace on July 20 to see if some agreement was still not possible. It broke down four days later and the last hope of avoiding violence seemed gone.
What Asquith would have done to avert a civil war while main taining the authority of the Constitution was not to be revealed, for on the day that the Buckingham Palace Conference broke up Austria sent her ultimatum, and within ten days the British army was embarking, not for Ulster, but for Flanders. In the
feverish struggle within the Cabinet that preceded the entry of Great Britain into the World War Asquith's position was never in doubt. He had throughout been a party to the ambiguous mili tary understandings and conversations which had been in progress with France since before the fall of the Balfour Government in 1905, and when the war came he did not waver in his conviction that both the duty and the interest of the country lay in throwing the country's whole weight into the scales against what he con sidered to be the calculated design of the Central Powers to establish a military despotism over Europe.
The invasion of Belgium by Germany saved his Government from disruption, and he addressed himself, free from domestic disquietudes, to the heaviest task ever imposed on a British prime minister. For the moment even the Irish trouble subsided, all political differences were shelved and Asquith became the voice of a united nation in a measure unequalled in modern Parliamen tary history. The speeches he delivered in the early days of the war have taken their place beside the classic orations of Pitt dur ing the Napoleonic wars, and his constancy of mind and freedom from all personal ambition played a dominating part during the next two years in laying the foundations of the ultimate victory. It was not to be expected that in the presence of so vast a con vulsion discontents would not develop. They became clamant as the true character of the struggle emerged. Asquith had made no change in the political constitution of his cabinet at the out break of war, although he had taken the leaders of the Opposition into his confidence and private counsels, but by the spring of 1915 it became clear that this informal relation would have to yield to a formal coalition.
In February Bonar Law and Lord Lansdowne intimated that they could accept no responsibility for the way in which the war was being conducted, and in the popular press a powerful and ceaseless agitation arose, directed mainly against Asquith, Grey and Haldane, and inspired by the inevitable shortage of munitions which the progress of the war had revealed. Coincidentally, a violent disagreement as to the employment of the navy in the Gallipoli adventure had arisen between Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, and Fisher, the first sea lord, and on May 26 Asquith reformed his cabinet on a coalition basis, bringing in the leaders of the Opposition and excluding Haldane. To meet the growing need for munitions, a special Ministry of Munitions was set up with Lloyd George at its head.