Catholic boys--on Catholic girls--by the sturdy defenders of law,
loyalty, and order in Belfast. It was not an occasion for strong
speech--the facts spoke with their silent eloquence better than any
tongue could do. The business was all done very quietly--it had the
sombre reticence of all tragic crises; everybody felt the importance of
the affair too deeply to give way to strong manifestation of feeling.
But there were significant and profound, though subdued, marks of
feeling on the Liberal Benches; and everybody could see what names were
in the minds of everybody.

[Sidenote: Mr. Asquith as leader.]

Mr. Asquith was for the moment the leader of the House. Though he has
still some of the ingenuous shyness of youth--though he is modest with
all his honours--though he has charmed everybody by the utter absence of
swagger and side in his dazzling elevation--there is a ready
adaptability about Mr. Asquith to a Parliamentary situation, which is as
astonishing as it is rare in men who have spent their lives in the
atmosphere of the law courts. The aptitude with which the right word
always comes to his lips--his magnificent composure, and, at the same
time, his power of striking the nail right on the head and right _into_
the head--all these things come out on an occasion such as that of April
24th. Very quietly, but very significantly, he told the story of the
riots; and very quietly and very significantly he spoke of the
responsibility of the Salisburys, and the Balfours, and the Jameses,
whose wild and wicked words had led to this outburst of medieval
bigotry.

[Sidenote: Mr. Dunbar Barton.]

Mr. Dunbar Barton made a valiant but vain attempt to stem the tide
against him, but he, like every other Unionist, was weighted down by the
feeling that the Orangemen were doing immense service to the cause of
Home Rule by their brutality. However, the fumes of Unionist oratory
seem to have ascended to the heads of all the excitable young men of the
Tory party. Mr. Dunbar Barton, personally, is one of the gentlest of
men; his manners are kind and good-natured enough to make him a
universal favourite--even with his vehement Nationalist foes; and he
speaks with evident sincerity. But he had so worked himself up that he
babbled blithely of spending a portion of his days in penal
servitude--talked big about a mysterious organization which was being
got ready in Ulster, and declared that the day would come when he would
stand by the