The Ulster group raised no objection to all this expenditure of time and energy. For they saw that it was not time wasted. From the standpoint of the highest national interest it was, indeed, more useful than anything the Convention could have accomplished by business-like methods. The summer and autumn of 1917, and the early months of 1918, covered a terribly critical period of the war. The country was never in greater peril, and the attitude of the Nationalists in the House of Commons added to the difficulties of the Government, as Mr. Bonar Law had complained in March. It was to placate them that the Convention had been summoned. It was a bone thrown to a snarling dog, and the longer there was anything to gnaw the longer would the dog keep quiet. The Ulster delegates understood this perfectly, and, as their chief desire was to help the Government to get on with the war, they had no wish to curtail the proceedings of the Convention, although they were never under the delusion that it could lead to anything in Ireland. Having regard to the origin of this strange assembly of Irishmen it might have been supposed that its ingenuity would be directed to finding some modification of Mr. Asquith's Home Rule Act which Ulster could accept. That Act was the point of departure for its investigation, and the quest was _ex hypothesi_ for some amendment that would not be an enlargement of the authority to be delegated to the subordinate Parliament, or any further loosening of the tie with Great Britain. Any proposal of the latter sort would be in the opposite direction from that in which the Convention was intended to travel. Yet this is precisely what was done from the very outset. The Act of 1914 was brushed aside as beneath contempt; and the Ulster delegates had to listen with amazement week after week to proposals for giving to the whole of Ireland, including their own Province, a constitution practically as independent of Great Britain as that of the Dominions. But what astonished the Ulstermen above everything was to find these extravagant demands of the Nationalists supported by those who were supposed to be representatives of Southern Unionism, with Lord Midleton, a prominent member of the Unionist Party in England, at their head. The only material point on which Lord Midleton differed from the extremists led by the Bishop of Raphoe was that he wished to limit complete fiscal autonomy for Ireland by reserving the control of Customs duties to the Imperial Parliament. Save in this single particular he joined forces with the Nationalists, and shocked the Unionists of the North by giving his support to a scheme of Home Rule going beyond anything ever suggested at Westminster by any Radical from Gladstone to Asquith.