dward; fellow
passengers jostled each other to get sight of him as he went down the
gangway and to give him a parting cheer from the deck; the dock sheds
were packed with people, many of them bare-headed and bare-footed
women, who pressed close in the hope of touching his hand, or hearing
one of his kindly and humorous greetings. It was the same in the streets
all the way from the docks to the centre of the city, and out through
the working-class district of Ballymacarret to the country beyond, and
in every hamlet on the road to Newtownards and Mount Stewart--people
congregating to give him a cheer as he passed in Lord Londonderry's
motor-car, or pausing in their work on the land to wave a greeting from
fields bordering the road.

Radical newspapers in England believed--or at any rate tried to make
their readers believe--that the "Northcliffe Press," particularly _The
Times_ and _Daily Mail_, gave an exaggerated account of these
extraordinary demonstrations of welcome to Carson, and of the
impressiveness of the great meetings which he addressed. But the
accounts in Lord Northcliffe's papers did not differ materially from
those in other journals like _The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express,
The Standard, The Morning Post, The Observer, The Scotsman_, and _The
Spectator_. There was no exaggeration. The special correspondents gave
faithful accounts of what they saw and heard, and no more. Editorial
support was a different matter. Lord Northcliffe's papers were unfailing
in their support of the Ulster cause, as were many other great British
journals; and even when at a later period Lord Northcliffe's attitude on
the general question of Irish government underwent a change that was
profoundly disappointing to Ulstermen, his papers never countenanced the
idea of applying coercion to Ulster. In the years 1911 to 1914 _The
Times_ remained true to the tradition started by John Walter, who,
himself a Liberal, went personally to Belfast in 1886 to inform himself
on the question, then for the first time raised by Gladstone; and,
having done so, supported the loyalist cause in Ireland till his death.
A series of weighty articles in 1913 and 1914 approved and encouraged
the resistance threatened by Ulster to Home Rule, and justified the
measures taken in preparation for it. Whatever may have been the reason
for a different attitude at a later date, Ulster owed a debt of
gratitude to _The Times_ in those troubled years.

The long-exp