“The people of Ulster believe, rightly or wrongly, that under a Government responsible to an Imperial Parliament they possess at present the fullest security which they can possess of their personal freedom, their liberties, and their right to transact their own business in their own way.  You have no right to offer them any inferior security to that; and if, after weighing the character of the Government which it is sought to impose upon them, they resolve that they are no longer bound to obey a law which does not give them equal and just protection with their fellow subjects, who can say—­how at all events can the descendants of those who resisted King James II say, that they have not a right, if they think fit, to resist, if they think they have the power, the imposition of a Government put upon them by force?"[44]

All the same, there never was a community on the face of the earth to whom “rebellion” in any real sense of the word was more hateful than to the people of Ulster.  They traditionally were the champions of “law and order” in Ireland; they prided themselves above all things on their “loyalty” to their King and to the British flag.  And they never entertained the idea that the movement which they started at Craigavon in 1911, and to which they solemnly pledged themselves by their Covenant in the following year, was in the slightest degree a departure from their cherished “loyalty”—­on the contrary, it was an emphatic assertion of it.  They held firmly, as Mr. Bonar Law and the whole Unionist party in Great Britain held also, that Mr. Asquith and his Government were forcing Home Rule upon them by unconstitutional methods.  They did not believe that loyalty in the best sense—­loyalty to the Sovereign, to the Empire, to the majesty of the law—­required of them passive obedience to an Act of Parliament placed by such means on the Statute-book, which they were convinced, moreover, was wholly repugnant to the great majority of the British people.

This aspect of the matter was admirably and soberly presented by The Times in one of the many weighty articles in which that great journal gave undeviating support to the Ulster cause.

“A free community cannot justly, or even constitutionally, be deprived of its privileges or its position in the realm by any measure that is not stamped with the considered and unquestionable approval of the great body of electors of the United Kingdom.  Any attempt so to deprive them is a fraud upon their fundamental rights, which they are justified in resisting, as an act of violence, by any means in their power.  This is elementary doctrine, borne out by the whole course of English history."[45]

That the position was paradoxical calls for no denial; but the pith of the paradox lay in the fact that a movement denounced as “rebellious” by its political opponents was warmly supported not only by large masses, probably by the majority, of the