at Mr. Churchill would bid
defiance to the Ulster Unionist Council; others urged him to do so and
to fulfil his engagement; some, with more prudence, suggested that he
might be extricated from the difficulty without loss of dignity if the
Chief Secretary would prohibit the meeting, as likely to produce a
breach of peace, and it was pointed out that Dublin Castle would
certainly forbid a meeting in Tipperary organised by the Ulster Unionist
Council, with Sir Edward Carson as principal speaker.

However, on the 25th of January Mr. Churchill addressed a letter, dated
from the Admiralty, to Lord Londonderry at Mount Stewart, in which he
said he was prepared to give up the idea of speaking in the Ulster Hall,
and would arrange for his meeting to be held elsewhere in the city, as
"it was not a point of any importance to him where he spoke in Belfast."
He did not explain why, if that were the case, he had ever made a plan
that so obviously constituted a direct premeditated challenge to Ulster.
Lord Londonderry, in his reply, said that the Ulster Unionist Council
had no intention of interfering with any meeting Mr. Churchill might
arrange "outside the districts which passionately resent your action,"
but that, "having regard to the intense state of feeling" which had been
aroused, the Council could accept no responsibility for anything that
might occur during the visit. Mr. Churchill's prudent change of plan
relieved the extreme tension of the situation, and there was much
speculation as to what influence had produced a result so satisfactory
to the Ulster Unionist Council. The truth seems to be that the Council's
Resolution had impaled the Government on the horns of a very awkward
dilemma, completely turning the tables on Ministers, whose design had
been to compel the Belfast Unionists either to adopt, on the one hand,
an attitude of apparent intolerance which would put them in the wrong in
the eyes of the British public, or, on the other, to submit to the
flagrant misrepresentation of their whole position which would be the
outcome of a Nationalist meeting in the Ulster Hall presided over by the
President of the illusory "Ulster Liberal Association," and with Lord
Randolph Churchill's son as the protagonist of Home Rule. The threat to
stop the meeting forced the Government to consider how the First Lord of
the Admiralty and his friends were to be protected and enabled to fulfil
their programme. The Irish Executive, according t