be England's garrison in Ireland; but they would
be very slow to use force against such a section, although quite ready
to justify coercion of the Irish majority. Yet what impressed Redmond
was the advance made, rather than the revelation of what resistance
remained. Ho had been more than thirty years an advocate of Ireland's
cause; and now by the spokesman of the impartial educated mind of
England the justice of that cause was admitted. The argument that a
general election was necessary, or would be efficacious in solving the
problem, was one with which he felt well able to contend. In that speech
the Archbishop of York admitted his impression that in by-elections
there had been "much more of Food Taxes and the Insurance Act than of
Home Rule."

On the other hand, for Ulster such a speech had the plainest possible
moral: Ulster's game was to become more grim, more determined, more
menacing. The Home Rule controversy had now resolved itself into a
question whether Ulster really meant business. Sir Edward Carson set
himself to make that plain beyond yea or nay.

In a speech delivered in Belfast, at the opening of a new drill hall, he
asked and answered the question, "Why are we drilling?" He and his
colleagues did not recognize the Parliament Act, he said; a law passed
under it would be only an act of usurpation, a breach of right. "We seek
nothing but the elementary right implanted in every man: the right, if
you are attacked, to defend yourself."

Ulster was going to stand by its Covenant.

"When we talk of force, we use it, if we are driven to use it, to beat
back those who will dare to barter away those elementary rights of
citizenship which we have inherited.... Go on, be ready, you are our
great army. Under what circumstances you have to come into action, you
must leave with us. There are matters which give us grave consideration
which we cannot and ought not to talk about in public. You must trust us
that we will select the most opportune methods of, if necessary, taking
on ourselves the whole government of the community in which we live. I
know a great deal of that will involve statutory illegality, but it will
also involve much righteousness."

Some of the questions which needed grave consideration were suggested by
happenings that followed hard on this speech. Much ridicule had been
poured on the drillings with dummy muskets. Ulster evidently decided to
push the matter a step further. A consignment of one