built up
by long-sustained and systematic defiance of the law. Yet the same
politicians who had excused, if they had not applauded, the "Plan of
Campaign," and the organised boycotting and cattle-driving which had for
years characterised the agitation for Home Rule, were unspeakably
shocked when Ulster formed a disciplined Volunteer force which never
committed an outrage, and prepared to set up a Provisional Government
rather than be ruled by an assembly of cattle-drivers in Dublin.
Moreover, many of Mr. Asquith's supporters, and one at least of his most
distinguished colleagues in the Cabinet of 1912, had themselves
organised resistance to an Education Act which they disliked but had
been unable to defeat in Parliament.

Nevertheless, it must, of course, be freely admitted that the question
as to what conditions justify resistance to the legal authority in the
State--or rebellion, if the more blunt expression be preferred--is an
exceedingly difficult one to answer. It would sound cynical to say,
though Carlyle hardly shrinks from maintaining, that success, and
success alone, redeems rebellion from wickedness and folly. Yet it would
be difficult to explain on any other principle why posterity has
applauded the Parliamentarians of 1643 and the Whigs of 1688, while
condemning Monmouth and Charles Edward; or why Mr. Gladstone sympathised
with Jefferson Davis when he looked like winning and withdrew that
sympathy when he had lost. But if success is not the test, what is? Is
it the aim of the men who resist? The aim that appears honourable and
heroic to one onlooker appears quite the opposite to another, and so the
test resolves itself into a matter of personal partisanship.

That is probably as near as one can get to a solution of the question.
Those who happen to agree with the purpose for which a rebellion takes
place think the rebels in the right; those who disagree think them in
the wrong. As Mr. Winston Churchill succinctly puts it when commenting
on the strictures passed on his father for "inciting" Ulster to resist
Home Rule, "Constitutional authorities will measure their censures
according to their political opinions." He reminds us, moreover, that
when Lord Randolph was denounced as a "rebel in the skin of a Tory," the
latter "was able to cite the authority of Lord Althorp, Sir Robert Peel,
Mr. Morley, and the Prime Minister (Gladstone) himself, in support of
the contention that circumstances might justify morally