ys, unhappily, been characteristic of a certain type of
Englishman to see no difference between the friends and the enemies of
his country, and, if he has a preference at all, to give it to the
latter. Apart from all other circumstances which in the eyes of
Ulstermen justified them up to the hilt in the policy they pursued,
apart from everything that distinguished them historically and morally
from Irish "rebels," there was the patent and all-important fact that
the motive of their opponents was hostility to England, whereas their
own motive was friendliness and loyalty to England. In that respect they
never wavered. If the course of events had ever led to the employment of
British troops to crush the resistance of Ulster to Home Rule, the
extraordinary spectacle would have been presented to the wondering world
of the King's soldiers shooting down men marching under the British flag
and singing "God save the King."

It was no doubt because this was very generally understood in England
that the sympathies of large masses of law-loving people were never for
a moment alienated from the men of Ulster by all the striving of their
enemies to brand them as rebels. Constitutional authorities may, as Mr.
Churchill says, "measure their censures according to their political
opinions," but the generality of men, who are not constitutional
authorities, whose political opinions, if they have any, are
fluctuating, and who care little for "juridical niceties," will measure
their censures according to their instinctive sympathies. And the sound
instinct of Englishmen forbade them to blame men who, if rebels in law,
were their firm friends in fact, for taking exceptional and even illegal
measures, when all others failed, to preserve the full unity which they
regarded as the fruit of that friendship.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] See _Life of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire,_ by Bernard Holland,
ii, pp. 249-51.

[42] _Life of Lord Randolph Churchill_, vol. ii, p. 65.

[43] _Annual Register_, 1912, p. 82.

[44] Bernard Holland's _Life of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire_, ii, 250.

[45] _The Times_, July 14th, 1913.

[46] Ibid., August 22nd, 1912.

[47] _Parliamentary Debates_ (House of Lords), July 15th, 1913.

CHAPTER XIII

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT AND PROPAGANDA

By the death of the Duke of Abercorn on the 3rd of January, 1913, the
Ulster Loyalists lost a leader who had for many years occupied a very
special place in their affection