The Southern Unionist Group was led by Lord Midleton; with him were Lords Mayo and Oranmore, representing the Irish peers.  The Irish Unionist Alliance had sent Mr. Stewart, a great land-agent, and Mr. Andrew Jameson (whose name, as someone said, was “a household word written in letters of gold throughout Ireland").  The Chambers of Commerce had their representatives from Dublin, Belfast and Cork.

In the Ulster group, Mr. Barrie, M.P., acted as leader, Lord Londonderry as secretary.  Of the rest, Sir George Clark, chairman of Workman and Clark’s great shipbuilding yard, had been known to us in Parliament.  A Scot by birth, with a life of thirty years spent in Belfast, during which time he had seen his business grow from two hundred hands to ten thousand, he knew nothing of Ireland but Belfast, and had no trace of Irish feeling.  In this he stood alone; but unhappily no man carried more weight in Belfast—­with the possible exception of one whom few of us outside Ulster knew before we came to that body.  Mr. Alexander McDowell was a solicitor by profession, the adviser of policy to all the business men of Belfast.  From the first day of our meeting he stood out by sheer weight of brain and personality.  He was to some of us the surprise of that assembly, and made us realize how little part we had in Ulster when the existence of such a man could be an unknown factor to us.

Mr. Pollock, President of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, was also new to us, and was destined to play a prominent part in our affairs.  With the Catholic prelates sat the two Archbishops of the Church of Ireland—­Dr. Crozier and Dr. Bernard—­to both of whom the democratic constitution of their Church had given great experience in management of business and discussion.  Dr. MacDermott, Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, was the official head of his Church for the year only and had not equal knowledge of administration.  An orator, with a touch of the enthusiast in his temperament, he was a simple and sympathetic figure; vehement in his political faith, yet responsive to all the human charities and deeply a lover of his country.  There was no better representative there of Ulster, of the Ulster difficulty—­at once so separate from and so akin to the rest of Ireland.

The Government nominees included, as was only natural, the most personally distinguished group.  First of them should be named the Provost of Trinity, Dr. Mahaffy, under whose aegis we assembled—­a great scholar and a great Irishman.  He brought with him an element of independent unregimented political thought—­often freakish in expression, but based on a vast knowledge of men and countries.  In a more practical sense, Lord MacDonnell and Lord Dunraven were our chief political theorists, devisers by temperament of constitutional machinery.  Lord MacDonnell’s repute as an administrator, Lord Dunraven’s as a leading figure in the Land Conference, gave weight to whatever came from them.  Lord