The events of the last three months, and especially the signing of the Covenant, had concentrated on Ulster the attention of the whole United Kingdom, not to speak of America and the British oversea Dominions.  This was not of unmixed advantage to the cause for which Ulster was making so determined a stand.  There was a tendency more and more to regard the opposition to Irish Home Rule as an Ulster question, and nothing else.  The Unionist protagonists of the earlier, the Gladstonian, period of the struggle, men like Salisbury, Randolph Churchill, Devonshire, Chamberlain, and Goschen, had treated it mainly as an Imperial question, which it certainly was.  In their eyes the Irish Loyalists, of whom the Ulstermen were the most important merely because they happened to be geographically concentrated, were valuable allies in a contest vital to the safety and prosperity of the British Empire; but, although the particular interests of these Loyalists were recognised as possessing a powerful claim on British sympathy and support, this was a consideration quite secondary in comparison with the larger aspects of Imperial policy raised by the demand for Home Rule.  It was an unfortunate result of the prominence into which Ulster was forced after the introduction of Mr. Asquith’s measure that these larger aspects gradually dropped away, and the defence of the Union came to be identified almost completely in England and Scotland with support of the Ulster Loyalists.  It was to this aspect of the case that Mr. Kipling gave prominence in the poem published on the day of the Balmoral meeting,[40] although no one was less prone than he to magnify a “side-show” in Imperial policy; and it was the same note that again was sounded on the eve of the Covenant by another distinguished English poet.  The general feeling of bewilderment and indignation that the only part of Ireland which had consistently upheld the British connection should now be not only thrown over by the British Government but denounced for its obstinate refusal to co-operate in a separatist movement, was finely expressed in Mr. William Watson’s challenging poem, “Ulster’s Reward,” which appeared in The Times a few days before the signing of the Covenant in Belfast: 

    “What is the wage the faithful earn? 
    What is a recompense fair and meet? 
    Trample their fealty under your feet—­
    That, is a fitting and just return. 
      Flout them, buffet them, over them ride,
      Fling them aside!

    “Ulster is ours to mock and spurn,
    Ours to spit upon, ours to deride. 
    And let it be known and blazoned wide
    That this is the wage the faithful earn: 
      Did she uphold us when others defied? 
    Then fling her aside.