ostasy
"just for a riband to stick in his coat," was the general belief; but it
was also resented that a man who had amassed, not "a handful of silver,"
but an enormous fortune, through a trade created by an eminent Unionist
firm, and under conditions brought about in Belfast by the Union with
Great Britain, should have kicked away the ladder by which he had
climbed from obscurity to wealth and rank. An additional cause of
offence, moreover, was that he was at that time trying to persuade
credulous people in England that there was in Ulster a party of Liberals
and Protestant Home Rulers, of which he posed as leader, although
everyone on the spot knew that the "party" would not fill a tramcar. Of
this party the same Correspondent of _The Times_ very truly said:

"Nearly every prominent man in it has received an office or a
decoration--and the fact that, with all the power of patronage in
their hands for the last six years, the Government had been able to
make so small an inroad into the solid square of Ulster Unionism is
a remarkable testimony to the strength of the sentiment which gives
it cohesion."

But a score of individuals in possession of an office equipped with
stamped stationery, and with a titled chairman of fabulous wealth, have
no difficulty in deluding strangers at a distance into the belief that
they are an influential and representative body of men. It was in
furtherance of the scheme for creating this false impression across the
Channel that Lord Pirrie and his so-called "Ulster Liberal Association"
invited Mr. Winston Churchill and the two Nationalist leaders to speak
in the Ulster Hall on the 8th of February, 1912, and that the
announcement of the fixture was made in the Press some three weeks
earlier.

The Unionist leaders were not long left in ignorance of the public
excitement which this news created in the city. A specially summoned
meeting of the Standing Committee, with Londonderry in the chair, was
held on the 16th of January to consider what action, if any, should be
taken; but it was no simple matter they had to decide, especially in the
absence of their leader, Sir Edward Carson, who was kept in England by
great Unionist meetings which he was addressing in Lancashire.

The reasons, on the one hand, for doing nothing were obvious enough. No
one, of course, suggested the possibility of preventing Mr. Churchill
coming to Belfast; but could even the Ulster Hall it