Instead of deluding public opinion with a notion that a sufficient application of force will provide a remedy, a wiser course would be to set about taking such steps as may be the means of recovering that consent without which society in Ireland cannot exist...[an offer should be made to the Irish] conceived on the most generous lines.

Speech in Parliament on the Irish insurgency after the Great War. Quoted in Lord Birkenhead, Halifax (Hamish Hamilton, 1965), pp. 121-2.