To these overtures, if they deserve the name, Mr. Bonar Law replied in an address to a gathering of fifteen thousand people at Wallsend on the 29th, in the presence of Sir Edward Carson. Having repeated the Blenheim pledge, he praised the discipline and restraint shown by the Ulster people and their leaders, but warned his hearers that the nation was drifting towards the tragedy of civil war, the responsibility for which would rest on the Government. He expressed his readiness to respond to Mr. Asquith's invitation, but pointed out that there were only three alternatives open to the Government. They must either (1) go on as they were doing and provoke Ulster to resist--that was madness; (2) they could consult the electorate, whose decision would be accepted by the Unionist Party as a whole; or (3) they could try to arrange a settlement which would at least avert civil war. There had been during the past six or eight months an unusual dearth of by-elections to test public opinion in regard to the Irish policy of the Government, and it must be borne in mind that the Unionist Party in Great Britain was still distracted by disputes over the Tariff question, which in January 1913 had very nearly led to the retirement of Mr. Bonar Law from the leadership. Nevertheless, in May the Unionists won two signal victories, one in Cambridgeshire, and one in Cheshire, where the Altrincham Division sent a staunch friend of Ulster to Parliament in the person of Mr. George C. Hamilton, who in his maiden speech declared that he had won the contest entirely on the Ulster Question. Even more significant, perhaps, were two elections which were fought while the interchange of party strokes over the Loreburn letter was in progress, and the results of both were declared on the 8th of November. At Reading, where the Unionists retained the seat, the Liberal candidate was constrained by pressure of opinion in the constituency to promise support for a policy of "separate and generous treatment for Ulster." At Linlithgow, a Liberal stronghold, where no such promise was forthcoming, the Liberal majority, in spite of a large Nationalist vote, was reduced by 1,500 votes as compared with the General Election. There were signs that Nonconformists, whose great leaders like Spurgeon and Dale had been hostile to Home Rule in Gladstone's time, were again becoming uneasy about handing over the Ulster Presbyterians and Methodists to the Roman hierarchy. A memorial against Home Rule, signed by 131,000 people, which had been presented to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in June, had no doubt had some effect on Nonconformist opinion in England, and it was just about the time when these elections took place that Carson was described at a large gathering of Nonconformists in London as "the best embodiment at this moment of the ancient spirit of Nonconformity."[53]