704 Ch. 1 8 • The Dominant Powers in the Age of Liberalism
not pass after it had been approved on three occasions by the House of
Commons would become law if two years had passed since it had first been
introduced in Parliament.
When Asquith threatened to ask King George V (who had succeeded to
the throne in 1910) to create enough new peerages to pass the bill, the
House of Lords, despite the opposition of intransigents, the so-called Die
hards, approved the Parliament Act in 1911. The House of Lords thus elim
inated its own constitutional veto, completing the long revolution in
British political life that had begun with the passage of the Reform Act of
1832, which had first reduced the disproportionate power of British
nobles. The House of Lords then reversed the Osborne judgment.
In 1911, a walkout by seamen, stevedores, bargemen, and ship repairers
spread rapidly in London, Manchester, and Liverpool. The prospect of a food
shortage forced the government’s hand. Through binding arbitration, the
strikers won raises. A national rail strike ended in compromise settlements.
When the Miners’ Federation called the first general coal strike, more than
800,000 men went out, which left another 1.3 million without work. The
miners gained a minimum wage, but when dockers failed to achieve their
strike goals in 1912, Britain’s largest wave of strikes to date ended in failure.
That many strikes ended in defeat may have helped turn British workers fur
ther toward parliamentary reformism. In any case, collective bargaining had
become commonplace in the 1890s, with conciliation and arbitration boards
established in many localities.
Irish Home Rule, still a major political issue, now seemed almost
inevitable. Irish politicians, peasants, and poets shared the burst of nation
alist sentiment characteristic of the first decade of the twentieth century.
The Gaelic League popularized Irish music and encouraged people to speak
Gaelic, not English. The poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), who
helped create a native Irish theater in Dublin, contributed to a literary
nationalism that sometimes glossed over class differences among the Irish:
“Parnell came down the road and said to a cheering man: / ‘Ireland will get
her freedom, and you shall still break stone.’” Such literature also tended to
romanticize the Irish as peasants made virtuous by poverty and hard work.
In the collection of short stories Dubliners (1912) by James Joyce (1882
1941), the countryside appears as an idyllic escape from the confusion of
Ireland’s rapidly growing, impoverished metropolis, which had once been
his home.
If some Irish nationalists would accept nothing less than complete inde
pendence from Britain, others advocated Home Rule. Irish Protestants liv
ing in Ulster, who outnumbered Catholics there by two to one, opposed any
measure of Home Rule, which they identified with Catholic “Rome Rule.”
In 1913, Ulster Protestants formed a paramilitary army of volunteers. At
the same time, an Irish Republican Army added men and arms. Century-old
wounds split open again, and Ireland seemed on the verge of civil war. In
September 1914, Parliament passed a Home Rule Bill, despite the intransi