Conservative Party
statesman and Prime Minister
. Born in the colony
of New Brunswick
, he is the only British Prime Minister to have been born outside the British Isles
. He was also the shortest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century, spending 211 days in office.
Law was born to a rural preacher and his wife in New Brunswick, where he spent his early life. A few years after his mother's death in 1861, his father remarried, and in 1870 Law moved to Helensburgh
, Scotland
, to live with his mother's sister Janet and her family, who ran a successful merchant bank.
We who represent the Unionist Party in England and Scotland have supported, and we mean to support to the end, the loyal minority [in Ireland]. We support them not because we are intolerant, but because their claims are just.
These people in the North-east of Ireland, from old prejudices perhaps more from anything else, from the whole of their past history, would prefer, I believe, to accept the government of a foreign country rather than submit to be governed by honourable gentlemen below the gangway [i.e. the Irish Nationalist Party].
Whatever steps you may feel compelled to take, whether they are constitutional, or whether in the long run they are unconstitutional, you have the whole Unionist Party, under my leadership, behind you.
I think perhaps it would be useful if I repeat again to you the words which I used in the first speech when I became leader of our party [in 1911]..."No government of which I am a member will ever be a government of reaction..." That was my view then:...it is my view today, and if I thought the Unionist party was, or would ever become, a party of that kind, I would not be a member of it.