embraced it regardless of the consequences; while the Liberals, real and so-called, thought the Parliamentary Party's influence was waning in Ireland, and threw them over without remorse: they had got as much out of them as was to be got, and for the rest they might shift for themselves. It was very difficult to believe that (as the Prime Minister said) the "dominant consideration was the war" and that preoccupation with it was the reason for his refusal to attend to the Irish problem. Everybody knew that Ministers, when they were interested, found time for many other things than the prosecution of the war. What was done and what was not done, and the reasons given both for action and for inaction, only served to deepen the impression of the insincerity of the Cabinet. Almost simultaneously the Parliamentary Party and Sinn Fein resolved upon an appeal from the English Ministry and the English Parliament to bodies that might be presumed to be less partial. The Irish Party withdrew from Parliament and sent a Manifesto to the United States (now on the verge of its declaration of war) and the self-governing Dominions. Sinn Fein summoned a Convention to meet in Dublin to assert the independence of Ireland, its status as a nation, and its right to representation at the Peace Conference. This was the first, but it was not to be the only, occasion upon, which the policy of the Parliamentary Party was moulded, against its will, by the pressure of facts, into a tacit acknowledgment of the justice of the Sinn Fein contention, that parliamentary action was useless. The only difference was that while Sinn Fein held that it always was and always would be useless, English policy being what it always had been, the Parliamentary Party held that the Cabinet had by its action since the Rising destroyed the efficacy of the normally useful and legitimate means of reform. The effect of this joint appeal from the Cabinet to the impartial opinion of English-speaking countries and belligerent nations was to induce the Prime Minister to bring forward "proposals" for the settlement of the question. He proposed the exclusion of six counties of Ulster from the Home Rule Act, if and when it became operative, the exclusion to be subject to reconsideration after five years; the immediate establishment of an Irish Council (in which the excluded counties were to have the same number of delegates as all the rest of Ireland put together) to legislate for Ireland during the war; and a reconsideration of the financial clauses of the Act. Failing the acceptance of this solution, the Prime Minister saw nothing for it but to summon a representative body of Irishmen to suggest the best means of governing their own country.