effective the oratory, unless the arrangements were based on good
organisation. It was by general consent a triumph of organisation, the
credit for which was very largely due to Mr. Richard Dawson Bates, the
Secretary of the Ulster Unionist Council. Sir Edward Carson himself very
wisely paid little attention to detail; happily there was no need for
him to do so, for he had beside him in Captain James Craig and Mr. Bates
two men with real genius for organisation, and indefatigable in
relieving "the chief" of all unnecessary work and worry. Mr. Bates had
all the threads of a complex network of organisation in his hands; he
kept in close touch with leading Unionists in every district; he always
knew what was going on in out-of-the-way corners, and where to turn for
the right man for any particular piece of work. Anyone whose duty it has
been to manage even a single political demonstration on a large scale
knows what numerous details have to be carefully foreseen and provided
for. In Ulster a succession of both outdoor and indoor demonstrations,
seldom if ever equalled in this country in magnitude and complexity of
arrangement, besides an amazing quantity of other miscellaneous work
inseparable from the conduct of a political movement in which crisis
followed crisis with bewildering rapidity, were managed year after year
from Mr. Bates's office in the Old Town Hall with a quiet,
unostentatious efficiency which only those could appreciate who saw the
machine at work and knew the master mechanic behind it. Of this
efficiency the September demonstrations in 1912 were a conspicuous
illustration.

Nor did the Loyalist women of Ulster lag an inch behind the men either
in organisation or in zeal for the Unionist cause, and their keenness at
every town visited in this September tour was exuberantly displayed.
Women had not yet been enfranchised, of course, and the Ulster women had
shown but little interest in the suffragette agitation which was raging