On the other hand, for Ulster such a speech had the plainest possible moral:  Ulster’s game was to become more grim, more determined, more menacing.  The Home Rule controversy had now resolved itself into a question whether Ulster really meant business.  Sir Edward Carson set himself to make that plain beyond yea or nay.

In a speech delivered in Belfast, at the opening of a new drill hall, he asked and answered the question, “Why are we drilling?” He and his colleagues did not recognize the Parliament Act, he said; a law passed under it would be only an act of usurpation, a breach of right.  “We seek nothing but the elementary right implanted in every man:  the right, if you are attacked, to defend yourself.”

Ulster was going to stand by its Covenant.

“When we talk of force, we use it, if we are driven to use it, to beat back those who will dare to barter away those elementary rights of citizenship which we have inherited....  Go on, be ready, you are our great army.  Under what circumstances you have to come into action, you must leave with us.  There are matters which give us grave consideration which we cannot and ought not to talk about in public.  You must trust us that we will select the most opportune methods of, if necessary, taking on ourselves the whole government of the community in which we live.  I know a great deal of that will involve statutory illegality, but it will also involve much righteousness.”

Some of the questions which needed grave consideration were suggested by happenings that followed hard on this speech.  Much ridicule had been poured on the drillings with dummy muskets.  Ulster evidently decided to push the matter a step further.  A consignment of one thousand rifles with bayonets, in cases marked “electrical fittings,” was seized at Belfast on June 3, 1913.  Other incidents of the same nature followed.  It was argued, by those who sought to represent the whole campaign as an elaborate piece of bluff, that the weapons were useless and that they were deliberately sent to be seized.  A feature which scarcely bore out this view was that one consignment was addressed to the Lord-Lieutenant of an Ulster county who was also an officer in the Army.  A justice of the peace, or an officer, to whom a consignment of arms had been sent for a Nationalist organization would have been ordered to clear himself in the fullest way of complicity, and even of sympathy, or he would have forfeited his commission.  The noble-man involved, however, made no explanation, and was probably never officially asked to do so.

It was commonly believed in the House of Commons that at some point, if not repeatedly, Government consulted the Irish leader or his principal advisers as to whether measures of repression should be undertaken against Ulster.  No such consultation took place.  But the opinion prevailing among the leading Nationalists was no doubt known or inferred.  Mr. Dillon, speaking on June 16, 1914, when the danger-point had been clearly reached, justified the previous abstinence from coercion.