people of this country, but by numbers of individuals of the highest character, occupying stations of great responsibility.  Whatever may be thought of men engaged in actual political conflict, whom some people appear to think capable of any wickedness, no one can seriously suggest that men like Lord Macnaghten, like the late and present Primates of Ireland, like the late Provost of Trinity, like many other sober thinkers who supported Ulster, were men who would lightly lend themselves to “rebellion,” or any other wild and irresponsible adventure.  As The Times very truly observed in a leading article in 1912: 

“We remember no precedent in our domestic history since the Revolution of 1688 for a movement among citizens, law-abiding by temperament and habit, which resembles the present movement of the Ulster Protestants.  It is no rabble who have undertaken it.  It is the work of orderly, prosperous, and deeply religious men."[46]

Nor did the paradox end there.  If the Ulster Movement was “rebellious,” its purpose was as paradoxical as its circumstances.  It had in it no subversive element.  In this respect it stands (so far as the writer’s knowledge goes) without precedent, a solitary instance in the history of mankind.  The world has witnessed rebellions without number, designed to bring about many different results—­to emancipate a people from oppression, to upset an obnoxious form of Government, to expel or to restore a rival dynasty, to transfer allegiance from one Sovereign or one State to another.  But has there ever been a “rebellion” the object of which was to maintain the status quo?  Yet that was the sole purpose of the Ulstermen in all they did from 1911 to 1914.  That fact, which distinguished their movement from every rebellion or revolution in history, placed them on a far more solid ground of reasonable justification than the excuse offered by Mr. Churchill for their bellicose attitude in his father’s day.  Although he is no doubt right in saying that “When men are sufficiently in earnest they will back their words with more than votes,” it is a plea that would cover alike the conduct of Halifax and the other Whigs who resisted the legal authority of James II, of the Jacobites who fought for his grandson, and of the contrivers of many another bloody or bloodless Revolution.  But there was nothing revolutionary in the Ulster Movement.  It was resistance to the transfer of a people’s allegiance without their consent; to their forcible expulsion from a Constitution with which they were content and their forcible inclusion in a Constitution which they detested.  This was the very antithesis of Revolution.  English Radical writers and politicians might argue that no “transfer of allegiance” was contemplated; but Ulstermen thought they knew better, and the later development of the Irish question proved how right they were.  Even had they been proved wrong instead of right in their conviction that the true aim of Irish Nationalism