[ 341] 
four-fifths of Ireland, by accepting it themselves they 
can solve the Irish difficulty and demonstrate their 
loyalty to the Empire in its hour of trial. 
[t has to be fully realised that the veto of a Unionist 
majority in four Ulster counties is now the sole 
obstacle to the settlement of the Irish question—so 
earnestly desired by Great Britain and Ireland, by 
the British Allies and the Dominions beyond the 
seas—a settlement that would help the winning of 
the War and justify before the world England’s pro- 
fessed enthusiasm for the liberation of Small Nations. 
An indefinite submission to such a veto is unthink- 
able. The Outlander minority in South Africa were 
allowed no veto on the concession of Self-Government 
to the Boers; no pro-German faction will be allowed 
to obstruct the liberation of Poland, The utter 
absurdity of the claim of the Ulster extremists is 
unconsciously revealed in a recent editorial in the 
Irish Times :— 
“It is not only the official Nationalists, driven, perhaps, 
to despair by the increasing failure of their prestige, who 
clamour for the coercion of Ulster. Some independent 
men who really desire a settlement as much for Ireland’s 
sake as for their own, have been tempted, by the new and 
imposing influences which the Government has invoked, to 
make a similar appeal to compulsion. They suggest that a 
generous scheme of Home Rule for the whole of Ireland 
would isolate a handful of Northern fanatics, whose opinions 
the Government could afford to disregard. The people 
who talk thus have little knowledge of Unionist Ulster or 
of the essential needs of a real Irish settlement. There 
can be no isolation of any section of Unionists in Ulster. 
A threat of violence to the smallest minority of them would 
create instantly a fierce and solid unity of resistance to the 
best scheme that the wit of British statesmanship could 
devise.” 
Here is an undisguised claim that “a handful of 
Northern fanatics” are entitled to a perpetual veto