Park, at which it was estimated that close on 200,000 people were
present. In all the speeches delivered and the resolutions adopted
during this memorable Liverpool visit the same note was sounded, of full
approval of the Covenanters and of determination to support them
whatever might befall.

The events of the last three months, and especially the signing of the
Covenant, had concentrated on Ulster the attention of the whole United
Kingdom, not to speak of America and the British oversea Dominions. This
was not of unmixed advantage to the cause for which Ulster was making so
determined a stand. There was a tendency more and more to regard the
opposition to Irish Home Rule as an Ulster question, and nothing else.
The Unionist protagonists of the earlier, the Gladstonian, period of the
struggle, men like Salisbury, Randolph Churchill, Devonshire,
Chamberlain, and Goschen, had treated it mainly as an Imperial question,
which it certainly was. In their eyes the Irish Loyalists, of whom the
Ulstermen were the most important merely because they happened to be
geographically concentrated, were valuable allies in a contest vital to
the safety and prosperity of the British Empire; but, although the
particular interests of these Loyalists were recognised as possessing a
powerful claim on British sympathy and support, this was a consideration
quite secondary in comparison with the larger aspects of Imperial policy
raised by the demand for Home Rule. It was an unfortunate result of the
prominence into which Ulster was forced after the introduction of Mr.
Asquith's measure that these larger aspects gradually dropped away, and
the defence of the Union came to be identified almost completely in
England and Scotland with support of the Ulster Loyalists. It was to
this aspect of the case that Mr. Kipling gave prominence in the poem
published on the day of the Balmoral meeting,[40] although no one was
less prone than he to magnify a "side-show" in Imperial policy; and it
was the same note that again was sounded on the eve of the Covenant by
another distinguished English poet. The general feeling of bewilderment
and indignation that the only part of Ireland which had consistently
upheld the British connection should now be not only thrown over by the
British Government but denounced for its obstinate refusal to co-operate
in a separatist movement, was finely expressed in Mr. William Watson's
challenging poem, "Ulster's Reward," which appe