rty which his father had so
pitilessly chastised, was of course displeasing to Conservatives
everywhere. Politicians who leave their friends to join their opponents
are never popular with those they abandon, and Mr. Winston Churchill was
certainly no exception. But such desertions, after the first burst of
wrath has evaporated, are generally accepted with a philosophic shrug in
what journalists call "political circles" in London, where plenty of
precedents for lapses from party virtue can be quoted. In the provinces,
even in England, resentment dies down less easily, and forgiveness is of
slow growth; but in Ulster, where a political creed is held with a
religious fervour, or, as a hostile critic might put it, with an
intolerance unknown in England, and where the dividing line between
"loyalty" and "disloyalty" is regarded almost as a matter of faith, the
man who passes from the one to the other arouses the same bitterness of
anger and contempt which soldiers feel for a deserter in face of the
enemy.

To such sentiments there was added, in the case of Mr. Winston
Churchill, a shocked feeling that his appearance in the Ulster Hall as
an emissary of Home Rule would be an act not only of political apostasy
but of filial impiety. The prevailing sentiment in Belfast at the time
was expressed somewhat brutally, perhaps, in the local Press--"he is
coming to dance on his father's coffin." It was an outrage on their
feelings which the people of Belfast could not and would not tolerate.
If Mr. Churchill was determined to flaunt the green flag let him find a
more suitable site than the very citadel in which they had been exhorted
by his father to keep the Union Jack flying to the last.

If anything could have added to the anger excited by this announcement
it would have been the fact that the Cabinet Minister was to be
accompanied on the platform of the Ulster Hall by Mr. Redmond and Mr.
Devlin, and that Lord Pirrie was to be his chairman. There was no more
unpopular citizen of Belfast than Lord Pirrie; and the reason was neatly
explained to English readers by the Special Correspondent of _The
Times_. "Lord Pirrie," he wrote, "deserted Unionism about the time the
Liberals acceded to power, and soon afterwards was made a Peer; whether
_propter hoc_ or only _post hoc_ I am quite unable to say, though no
Ulster Unionist has any doubts on the subject."[15] But that was not
quite the whole reason. That Lord Pirrie was an example of ap