lag to the Ulster leader? Did those who
spontaneously started the National Anthem in the presence of the King
without warrant from the prearranged programme, and made the Queen smile
at the emphasis with which they "confounded politics" and "frustrated
knavish tricks," remember the fervour with which on many a past occasion
the same strains testified to Ulster's loyalty in the midst of
perplexity and apprehension? If these memories crowded in, they must
have added to the sense of relief arising from the conviction that the
ceremony they were now witnessing was the realisation of the policy
propounded by Carson, when he declared that Ulster must always be ruled
either by the Imperial Parliament or by a Government of her own.

But the moment of all others on that memorable day that must have been
suggestive of such reflections was when the King formally opened the
first Parliament of Northern Ireland in the same building that had
witnessed the signing of the Ulster Covenant. Without the earlier event
the later could not have been. If 1921 could have been fully foreseen in
1912 it might have appeared to many Covenanters as the disappointment of
a cherished ideal. But those who lived to listen to the King's Speech in
the City Hall realised that it was the dissipation of foreboding.
However regarded, it was, as King George himself pronounced, "a
profoundly moving occasion in Irish history."

The Speech from the Throne in which these words occurred made a deep
impression all over the world, and nowhere more than in Ulster itself.
No people more ardently shared the touchingly expressed desire of the
King that his coming to Ireland might "prove to be the first step
towards an end of strife amongst her people, whatever their race or
creed." So, too, when His Majesty told the Ulster Parliament that he
"felt assured they would do their utmost to make it an instrument of
happiness and good government for all parts of the community which they
represented," the Ulster people believed that the King's confidence in
them would not prove to have been misplaced.

Happily, no prophetic vision of those things that were shortly to come
to pass broke in to disturb the sense of satisfaction with the haven
that had been reached. The future, with its treachery, its alarms, its
fresh causes of uncertainty and of conflict, was mercifully hidden from
the eyes of the Ulster people when they acclaimed the inauguration of
their Parliament by their K