If this belief in the inherent disloyalty of Nationalist Ireland to the British Empire did any injustice to individual Nationalist politicians, they had nobody but themselves to blame for it.  Their pronouncements in America, as well as at home, were scrutinised in Ulster with a care that Englishmen seldom took the trouble to give them.  Nor must it be forgotten that, up to the date when Mr. Gladstone made Home Rule a plank in an English party’s programme—­which, whatever else it did, could not alter the facts of the case—­the same conviction, held in Ulster so tenaciously, had prevailed almost universally in Great Britain also; and had been proclaimed by no one so vehemently as by Mr. Gladstone himself, whose famous declarations that the Nationalists of that day were “steeped to the lips in treason,” and were “marching through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire,” were not so quickly forgotten in Ulster as in England, nor so easily passed over as either meaningless or untrue as soon as they became inconvenient for a political party to remember.  English supporters of Home Rule, when reminded of such utterances, dismissed with a shrug the “unedifying pastime of unearthing buried speeches”; and showed equal determination to see nothing in speeches delivered by Nationalist leaders in America inconsistent with the purely constitutional demand for “extended self-government.”

Ulster never would consent to bandage her own eyes in similar fashion, or to plug her ears with wool.  The “two voices” of Nationalist leaders, from Mr. Parnell to Mr. Dillon, were equally audible to her; and, of the two, she was certain that the true aim of Nationalist policy was expressed by the one whose tone was disloyal to the British Empire.  Look-out was kept for any change in the direction of moderation, for any real indication that those who professed to be “constitutional Nationalists” were any less determined than “the physical force party” to reach the goal described by Parnell in the famous sentence, “None of us will be ... satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England.”

No such indication was ever discernible.  On the contrary, Parnell’s phrase became a refrain to be heard in many later pronouncements of his successors, and the policy he thus described was again and again propounded in after-years on innumerable Nationalist platforms, in speeches constantly quoted to prove, as was the contention of Ulster from the first, that Home Rule as understood by English Liberals was no more than an instalment of the real demand of Nationalists, who, if they once obtained the “comparative freedom” of an Irish legislature—­to quote the words used by Mr. Devlin at a later date—­would then, with that leverage, “operate by whatever means they should think best to achieve the great and desirable end” of complete independence of Great Britain.