ared in _The Times_ a few
days before the signing of the Covenant in Belfast:

"What is the wage the faithful earn?
What is a recompense fair and meet?
Trample their fealty under your feet--
That, is a fitting and just return.
Flout them, buffet them, over them ride,
Fling them aside!

"Ulster is ours to mock and spurn,
Ours to spit upon, ours to deride.
And let it be known and blazoned wide
That this is the wage the faithful earn:
Did she uphold us when others defied?
Then fling her aside.

"Where on the Earth was the like of it done
In the gaze of the sun?
She had pleaded and prayed to be counted still
As one of our household through good and ill,
And with scorn they replied;
Jeered at her loyalty, trod on her pride,
Spurned her, repulsed her,
Great-hearted Ulster;
Flung her aside."

Appreciating to the full the sympathy and support which their cause
received from leading men of letters in England, it was not the fault of
the Ulstermen themselves that the larger Imperial aspects of the
question thus dropped into the background. They continually strove to
make Englishmen realise that far more was involved than loyal support of
England's only friends in Ireland; they quoted such pronouncements as
Admiral Mahan's that "it is impossible for a military man, or a
statesman with appreciation of military conditions, to look at a map and
not perceive that if the ambition of the Irish Separatists were
realised, it would be even more threatening to the national life of
Britain than the secession of the South was to that of the American
Republic.... An independent Parliament could not safely be trusted even
to avowed friends"; and they showed over and over again, quoting chapter
and verse from Nationalist utterances, and appealing to acknowledged
facts in recent and contemporary history, that it was not to "avowed
friends," but to avowed enemies, that Mr. Asquith was prepared to
concede an independent Parliament.

But those were the days before the rude awakening from the dream that
the world was to repose for ever in the soft wrappings of universal
peace. Questions of national defence bored Englishmen. The judgment of
the greatest strategical authority of the age weighed less than one of
Lord Haldane's verbose platitudes, and the urgent warnings of Lord
Roberts less than the impudent snub administered to him by an
Under-