ase:

"Our demand is a very simple one. We ask for no privileges, but we
are determined that no one shall have privileges over us. We ask
for no special rights, but we claim the same rights from the same
Government as every other part of the United Kingdom. We ask for
nothing more; we will take nothing less. It is our inalienable
right as citizens of the British Empire, and Heaven help the men
who try to take it from us."

It was all no doubt a mere restatement--though an admirably lucid and
forcible restatement--of doctrine with which his hearers had long been
familiar. The great question still awaited an answer--how was effect to
be given to this resolve, now that there was no longer hope of
salvation through the sympathy and support of public opinion in Great
Britain? This was what the eager listeners at Craigavon hoped in hushed
expectancy to hear from their new leader. He did not disappoint them:

"Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister, says that we are not to be
allowed to put our case before the British electorate. Very well.
By that determination he drives you in the ultimate result to rely
upon your own strength, and we must follow all that out to its
logical conclusion.... That involves something more than that we do
not accept Home Rule. We must be prepared, in the event of a Home
Rule Bill passing, with such measures as will carry on for
ourselves the government of those districts of which we have
control. We must be prepared--and time is precious in these
things--the morning Home Rule passes, ourselves to become
responsible for the government of the Protestant Province of
Ulster. We ask your leave at the meeting of the Ulster Unionist
Council, to be held on Monday, there to discuss the matter, and to
set to work, to take care that at no time and at no intervening
interval shall we lack a Government in Ulster, which shall be a
Government either by the Imperial Parliament, or by ourselves."

Here, then, was the first authoritative declaration of a definite policy
to be pursued by Ulster in the circumstances then existing or foreseen,
and it was a policy that was followed with undeviating consistency under
Carson's leadership for the next nine years. To be left under the
government of the Imperial Parliament was the alternative to be
preferred, and was asserted to be an inalienable right; but, if all