which produce idolatry and blind allegiance. What his followers gave him
was admiration, liking and profound respect. No less than this was
strictly due to his high standard of honour, his scorn of all personal
pettiness, his control of temper. In twelve years I heard many
complaints of the manner in which things were managed in the party: I
scarcely ever remember to have heard anyone complain of him. He was
always spoken of as "The Chairman"; no one attributed to him sole
responsibility; and he was the last on whom any man desired to lay a
fault.

Yet when it came, as it often did, to a question of weighing advices one
against the other, there was no mistake how men's opinions inclined. He
had taught his party by experience to have almost implicit confidence in
his judgment; and by this earned confidence he led and he ruled.



CHAPTER III

THE HOME RULE BILL OF 1912


The year 1912, in which the straight fight on Home Rule was to begin,
opened stormily. Mr. Churchill was announced to speak under the auspices
of the Ulster Liberal Association in the Ulster Hall at Belfast. It was
the hall in which his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had used the
famous phrase "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right." Belfast was
determined that the son should not unsay what the father had said in
this consecrated building; it would be, as an Ulster member put it in
the House of Commons, "a profanation." On this first round, Ulster won;