self.

Next day we assembled--some ninety persons. The main bulk consisted of
local representatives--thirty-one chairmen of County Councils, one only
having declined to serve. Two of these, Mr. O'Dowd and Mr. Fitzgibbon,
were members of our party. There were eight representatives of the Urban
Councils, over and above the Lord Mayors of Dublin, Belfast and Cork and
the Mayor of Derry. Labour had seven representatives, one of whom, Mr.
Lundon, representing the Agricultural Labourers' Union of the South, was
an Irish member of Parliament. One was a railway operative from Dublin;
one a Catholic Trade-Unionist leader from Derry; the remaining four came
from Belfast. Organized labour in Dublin and the Southern towns had
endorsed Sinn Fein's attitude and declined to recognize the Convention.

The Southern Unionist Group was led by Lord Midleton; with him were
Lords Mayo and Oranmore, representing the Irish peers. The Irish
Unionist Alliance had sent Mr. Stewart, a great land-agent, and Mr.
Andrew Jameson (whose name, as someone said, was "a household word
written in letters of gold throughout Ireland"). The Chambers of
Commerce had their representatives from Dublin, Belfast and Cork.

In the Ulster group, Mr. Barrie, M.P., acted as leader, Lord Londonderry
as secretary. Of the rest, Sir George Clark, chairman of Workman and
Clark's great shipbuilding yard, had been known to us in Parliament. A
Scot by birth, with a life of thirty years spent in Belfast, during
which time he had seen his business grow from two hundred hands to ten
thousand, he knew nothing of Ireland but Belfast, and had no trace of
Irish feeling. In this he stood alone; but unhappily no man carried more
weight in Belfast--with the possible exception of one whom few of us
outside Ulster knew before we came to that body. Mr. Alexander McDowell
was a solicitor by profession, the adviser of policy to all the business
men of Belfast. From the first day of our meeting he stood out by sheer
weight of brain and personality. He was to some of us the surprise of
that assembly, and made us realize how little part we had in Ulster when
the existence of such a man could be an unknown factor to us.

Mr. Pollock, President of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, was also new
to us, and was destined to play a prominent part in our affairs. With
the Catholic prelates sat the two Archbishops of the Church of
Ireland--Dr. Crozier and Dr. Bernard--to both of whom the democratic
co