judgment and good sense; but something more was needed for the critical times they saw ahead.  After careful consideration, they took a step which in the event proved to be of momentous importance, and of extreme good fortune, for the enterprise that the immediate future had in store for them.  Mr. J.B.  Lonsdale, Member for Mid Armagh, Hon. Secretary of the Irish Unionist Parliamentary Party, was deputed to request Sir Edward Carson, K.C., to accept the leadership of the Irish Unionist party in the House of Commons.

Several days elapsed before they received an answer; but when it came it was, happily for Ulster, an acceptance.  It is easy to understand Sir Edward Carson’s hesitation before consenting to assume the leadership.  After carrying all before him in the Irish Courts, where he had been Law Officer of the Crown, he had migrated to London, where he had been Solicitor-General during the last six years of the Unionist Administration, and by 1910 had attained a position of supremacy at the English Bar, with the certain prospect of the highest legal advancement, and with an extremely lucrative practice, which his family circumstances made it no light matter for him to sacrifice, but which he knew it would be impossible for him to retain in conjunction with the political duties he was now urged to undertake.  Although only in his fifty-seventh year, he was never one of those who feel younger than their age; nor did he minimise in his own mind the disability caused by his too frequent physical ailments, which inclined him to shrink from embarking upon fresh work the extent and nature of which could not be exactly foreseen.  As to ambition, there are few men who ever were less moved by it, but he could not leave altogether out of consideration his firm conviction—­which ultimately proved to have been ill-founded—­that acceptance of the Ulster leadership would cut him off from all promotion, whether political or legal.[11]

Moreover, although for the moment it was the leadership of a parliamentary group to which he was formally invited, it was obvious that much more was really involved; the people in Ulster itself needed guidance in the crisis that was visibly approaching.  Ever since Lord Randolph Churchill, with the concurrence of Lord Salisbury, first inspired them in 1886 with the spirit of resistance in the last resort to being placed under a Dublin Parliament, and assured them of British sympathy and support if driven to that extremity, the determination of Ulster in this respect was known to all who had any familiarity with the temper of her people.  Any man who undertook to lead them at such a juncture as had been reached in 1910 must make that determination the starting-point of his policy.  It was a task that would require not only statesmanship, but political courage of a high order.  Lord Randolph Churchill, in his famous Ulster Hall speech, had said that “no portentous change such as the repeal of the Union, no change so