arty in the House of Commons.
Several days elapsed before they received an answer; but when it came it
was, happily for Ulster, an acceptance. It is easy to understand Sir
Edward Carson's hesitation before consenting to assume the leadership.
After carrying all before him in the Irish Courts, where he had been Law
Officer of the Crown, he had migrated to London, where he had been
Solicitor-General during the last six years of the Unionist
Administration, and by 1910 had attained a position of supremacy at the
English Bar, with the certain prospect of the highest legal advancement,
and with an extremely lucrative practice, which his family circumstances
made it no light matter for him to sacrifice, but which he knew it would
be impossible for him to retain in conjunction with the political duties
he was now urged to undertake. Although only in his fifty-seventh year,
he was never one of those who feel younger than their age; nor did he
minimise in his own mind the disability caused by his too frequent
physical ailments, which inclined him to shrink from embarking upon
fresh work the extent and nature of which could not be exactly foreseen.
As to ambition, there are few men who ever were less moved by it, but he
could not leave altogether out of consideration his firm
conviction--which ultimately proved to have been ill-founded--that
acceptance of the Ulster leadership would cut him off from all
promotion, whether political or legal.[11]
Moreover, although for the moment it was the leadership of a
parliamentary group to which he was formally invited, it was obvious
that much more was really involved; the people in Ulster itself needed
guidance in the crisis that was visibly approaching. Ever since Lord
Randolph Churchill, with the concurrence of Lord Salisbury, first
inspired them in 1886 with the spirit of resistance in the last resort
to being placed under a Dublin Parliament, and assured them of British
sympathy and support if driven to that extremity, the determination of
Ulster in this respect was known to all who had any familiarity with the
temper of her people. Any man who undertook to lead them at such a
juncture as had been reached in 1910 must make that determination the
starting-point of his policy. It was a task that would require not only
statesmanship, but political courage of a high order. Lord Randolph
Churchill, in his famous Ulster Hall speech, had said that "no
portentous change such as the repeal o
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