The significance of the announcement which Mr. Asquith had now made lay in the fact that it was an acknowledgment by the Government for the first time that there was an "Ulster Question" to be dealt with--that Ulster was not, as had hitherto been the Liberal theory, like any other minority who must submit to the will of the majority opposed to it, but a distinct community, conditioned by special circumstances entitling it to special treatment. The Prime Minister had thus, as Mr. Bonar Law insisted, "destroyed utterly the whole foundation on which for the last two years the treatment extended to Ulster in this Bill has been justified." From that day it became impossible ever again to contend that Ulster was merely a recalcitrant minority in a larger unity, without rights of her own. The speeches of the Unionist leaders in the House of Commons showed clearly enough how little faith they had that the Government intended to do anything that could lead to an agreed settlement. The interval that passed before the nature of the Government's proposals was made known increased rather than diminished this distrust. The air was full of suggestions, the most notable of which was put forward by the veteran constitutional lawyer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, who proposed that Ulster should be governed by a separate committee elected by its own constituencies, with full legislative, administrative, and financial powers, subject only to the Crown and the Imperial Parliament.[61] Unionists did not believe that the Liberal Cabinet would be allowed by their Nationalist masters to offer anything so liberal to Ulster; nor did that Province desire autonomy for itself. They believed that the chief desire of the Government was not to appease Ulster, but to put her in a tactically indefensible position. This fear had been expressed by Lord Lansdowne as long before as the previous October, when he wrote privately to Carson in reference to Lord Loreburn's suggested Conference that he suspected the intention of the Government to be "to offer us terms which they know we cannot accept, and then throw on us the odium of having obstructed a settlement." Mr. Walter Long had the same apprehension in March 1914 as to the purpose of Mr. Asquith's unknown proposals. Both these leaders herein showed insight and prescience, for not only Mr. Asquith's Government, but also that which succeeded it, had resort on many subsequent occasions to the manoeuvre suspected by Lord Lansdowne.