such a Parliament might be endowed.  It is noteworthy, however, in view of the importance which the question afterwards attained, that so early as January 1912 Sir Edward Carson, speaking in Manchester, maintained that without fiscal autonomy Home Rule was impossible,[25] and that some months later Mr. Bonar Law, in a speech at Glasgow on the 21st of May, said that if the Unionist Party were in a position where they had to concede Home Rule to Ireland they would include fiscal autonomy in the grant.[26] These leaders, who, unlike the Liberal Ministers, had some knowledge of the Irish temperament, realised from the first the absurdity of Mr. Asquith’s attempt to satisfy the demands of “the rebel party” by offering something very different from what that party demanded.  The Ulster leader and the leader of the Unionist Party knew as well as anybody that fiscal autonomy meant “virtual separation between Ireland and Great Britain,” but they also knew that separation was the ultimate aim of Nationalist policy, and that there could be no finality in the Liberal compromise; and they no doubt agreed with the forcible language used by Mr. Balfour in the previous autumn, when he said that “the rotten hybrid system of a Parliament with municipal duties and a national feeling seemed to be the dream of political idiots.”

The ferment of speculation as to the Government’s intentions continued during the early weeks of the Parliamentary session, which opened on the 14th of February, but all inquiries by members of the House of Commons were met by variations on the theme “Wait and See.”  Unionists, however, realised that it was not in Parliament, but outside, that the only effective work could be done, in the hope of forcing a dissolution of Parliament before the Bill could become law.  A vigorous campaign was conducted throughout the country, especially in Lancashire, and arrangements were made for a monster demonstration in Belfast, which should serve both as a counter-blast to the Churchill fiasco, and for enabling English and Scottish Unionists to test for themselves the temper of the Ulster resistance.  In the belief that the Home Rule Bill would be introduced before Easter, it was decided to hold this meeting in the Recess, as Mr. Bonar Law had promised to speak, and a number of English Members of Parliament wished to be present.  At the last moment the Government announced that the Bill would not be presented till the 11th of April, after Parliament reassembled, and its provisions were therefore still unknown when the demonstration took place on the 9th in the Show Ground of the Royal Agricultural Society at Balmoral, a suburb of Belfast.

Feeling ran high as the date of the double event approached, and the indignant sense of wrong that prevailed in Ulster was finely voiced in a poem, entitled “Ulster 1912,” written by Mr. Kipling for the occasion which appeared in The Morning Post on the day of the Balmoral demonstration, of which the first and last stanzas were: