As Mr.Winston Churchill succinctly puts it when commenting on the strictures passed on his father for "inciting" Ulster to resist Home Rule, "Constitutional authorities will measure their censures according to their political opinions." He reminds us, moreover, that when Lord Randolph was denounced as a "rebel in the skin of a Tory," the latter "was able to cite the authority of Lord Althorp, Sir Robert Peel, Mr.Morley, and the Prime Minister (Gladstone) himself, in support of the contention that circumstances might justify morally, if not technically, violent resistance and even civil war."[42] To this distinguished catalogue of authorities an Ulster apologist might have added the name of the Chief Secretary for Ireland in Mr.Asquith's own Cabinet, who admitted in 1912 that "if the religion of the Protestants were oppressed or their property despoiled they would be right to fight[43];" which meant that Mr.Birrell did not condemn fighting in itself, provided he were allowed to decide when the occasion for it had arisen.

Greater authorities than Mr.Birrell held that the Ulster case for resistance was a good and valid one as it stood.

No English statesman of the last half-century has deservedly enjoyed a higher reputation for political probity, combined with sound common sense, than the eighth Duke of Devonshire.

As long ago as 1893, when this same issue had already been raised in circumstances much less favourable to Ulster than after the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911, the Duke of Devonshire said: "The people of Ulster believe, rightly or wrongly, that under a Government responsible to an Imperial Parliament they possess at present the fullest security which they can possess of their personal freedom, their liberties, and their right to transact their own business in their own way.

You have no right to offer them any inferior security to that; and if, after weighing the character of the Government which it is sought to impose upon them, they resolve that they are no longer bound to obey a law which does not give them equal and just protection with their fellow subjects, who can say--how at all events can the descendants of those who resisted King James II say, that they have not a right, if they think fit, to resist, if they think they have the power, the imposition of a Government put upon them by force ?"[44] All the same, there never was a community on the face of the earth to whom "rebellion" in any real sense of the word was more hateful than to the people of Ulster.