rished "loyalty"--on the contrary, it was an emphatic assertion
of it. They held firmly, as Mr. Bonar Law and the whole Unionist party
in Great Britain held also, that Mr. Asquith and his Government were
forcing Home Rule upon them by unconstitutional methods. They did not
believe that loyalty in the best sense--loyalty to the Sovereign, to the
Empire, to the majesty of the law--required of them passive obedience to
an Act of Parliament placed by such means on the Statute-book, which
they were convinced, moreover, was wholly repugnant to the great
majority of the British people.

This aspect of the matter was admirably and soberly presented by _The
Times_ in one of the many weighty articles in which that great journal
gave undeviating support to the Ulster cause.

"A free community cannot justly, or even constitutionally, be
deprived of its privileges or its position in the realm by any
measure that is not stamped with the considered and unquestionable
approval of the great body of electors of the United Kingdom. Any
attempt so to deprive them is a fraud upon their fundamental
rights, which they are justified in resisting, as an act of
violence, by any means in their power. This is elementary doctrine,
borne out by the whole course of English history."[45]

That the position was paradoxical calls for no denial; but the pith of
the paradox lay in the fact that a movement denounced as "rebellious" by
its political opponents was warmly supported not only by large masses,
probably by the majority, of the people of this country, but by numbers
of individuals of the highest character, occupying stations of great
responsibility. Whatever may be thought of men engaged in actual
political conflict, whom some people appear to think capable of any
wickedness, no one can seriously suggest that men like Lord Macnaghten,
like the late and present Primates of Ireland, like the late Provost of
Trinity, like many other sober thinkers who supported Ulster, were men
who would lightly lend themselves to "rebellion," or any other wild and
irresponsible adventure. As _The Times_ very truly observed in a leading
article in 1912:

"We remember no precedent in our domestic history since the
Revolution of 1688 for a movement among citizens, law-abiding by
temperament and habit, which resembles the present movement of the
Ulster Protestants. It is no rabble who have undertaken it. It