into power.  Thus in very real fear and terror of their disabilities under an Irish Parliament, which would be elected and dominated by a secret sectarian organisation, they entered into the famous Ulster Covenant and solemnly swore to resist Home Rule and to raise a Volunteer Army for the purpose of giving force and effect to their resistance.  The visit of Mr Winston Churchill to Belfast early in 1912 to address a Nationalist meeting there was an aggravation of the situation and there was a time during his progress through the city when his motor car was in imminent danger of being upset and when it was surrounded by a howling and enraged mob of Orangemen, who shouted the fiercest curses and threats at him.  As a result of this experience Mr Churchill was never afterwards a very enthusiastic supporter of what came to be called “the coercion of Ulster.”

Meanwhile Mr Churchill’s most ill-advised visit, from the point of view of political tactics, was just the thing required to raise all the worst elements of Orangeism and to give its best fillip to the signing of the Covenant, which proceeded apace, not only in Ulster, but in Great Britain, even to the extent that the army was said to be honey-combed with sworn Covenanters, contrary to all the rules and doctrines of military law and discipline.  And in due course, in reply to the challenge of Mr Churchill’s visit the leader of the Unionist Party, Mr Bonar Law, visited Balmoral, near Belfast, and reviewed from 80,000 to 100,000 Ulster Volunteers, who marched past him in military order, and saluted.  Sir Edward Carson made the meeting repeat after him the pledge:  “We will never in any circumstances submit to Home Rule.”

The Unionist Party was now solidly and assertively on the side of Ulster in its opposition to Home Rule.  They held a demonstration at Blenheim on 27th July 1912, when some three thousand delegates from political associations, invited by the Duke of Marlborough, were present.  Mr Bonar Law described the Liberal Ministry as a revolutionary committee which had seized by fraud on despotic power, and declared that the Unionist Party would use whatever means seemed likely to be most effective.  He made the declaration that Ireland was two nations, a theory which, strangely enough, Mr Lloyd George, as Coalition Premier, advocated eight years later.  He went on to say that the Ulster people would submit to no ascendancy and “he could imagine no lengths of resistance to which they might go in which he would not be ready to support them” and in which they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.