not,
without some reason, in looking back on their own bad past, expect
that it would be taken out of them when the Catholics got into power.
Thus in very real fear and terror of their disabilities under an Irish
Parliament, which would be elected and dominated by a secret sectarian
organisation, they entered into the famous Ulster Covenant and
solemnly swore to resist Home Rule and to raise a Volunteer Army for
the purpose of giving force and effect to their resistance. The visit
of Mr Winston Churchill to Belfast early in 1912 to address a
Nationalist meeting there was an aggravation of the situation and
there was a time during his progress through the city when his motor
car was in imminent danger of being upset and when it was surrounded
by a howling and enraged mob of Orangemen, who shouted the fiercest
curses and threats at him. As a result of this experience Mr Churchill
was never afterwards a very enthusiastic supporter of what came to be
called "the coercion of Ulster."

Meanwhile Mr Churchill's most ill-advised visit, from the point of
view of political tactics, was just the thing required to raise all
the worst elements of Orangeism and to give its best fillip to the
signing of the Covenant, which proceeded apace, not only in Ulster,
but in Great Britain, even to the extent that the army was said to be
honey-combed with sworn Covenanters, contrary to all the rules and
doctrines of military law and discipline. And in due course, in reply
to the challenge of Mr Churchill's visit the leader of the Unionist
Party, Mr Bonar Law, visited Balmoral, near Belfast, and reviewed from
80,000 to 100,000 Ulster Volunteers, who marched past him in military
order, and saluted. Sir Edward Carson made the meeting repeat after
him the pledge: "We will never in any circumstances submit to Home
Rule."

The Unionist Party was now solidly and assertively on the side of
Ulster in its opposition to Home Rule. They held a demonstration at
Blenheim on 27th July 1912, when some three thousand delegates from
political associations, invited by the Duke of Marlborough, were
present. Mr Bonar Law described the Liberal Ministry as a
revolutionary committee which had seized by fraud on despotic power,
and declared that the Unionist Party would use whatever means seemed
likely to be most effective. He made the declaration that Ireland was
two nations, a theory which, strangely enough, Mr Lloyd George, as
Coalition Premier, advocated eight