background. The Ulster Members of the House of Commons realised,
therefore, the grave importance of finding a leader of the calibre
necessary for dealing on equal terms with such orators and
Parliamentarians as Mr. Asquith and Mr. John Redmond. They did not
deceive themselves into thinking that such a leader was to be found
among their own number. They could produce several capable speakers, and
men of judgment and good sense; but something more was needed for the
critical times they saw ahead. After careful consideration, they took a
step which in the event proved to be of momentous importance, and of
extreme good fortune, for the enterprise that the immediate future had
in store for them. Mr. J.B. Lonsdale, Member for Mid Armagh, Hon.
Secretary of the Irish Unionist Parliamentary Party, was deputed to
request Sir Edward Carson, K.C., to accept the leadership of the Irish
Unionist party in the House of Commons.

Several days elapsed before they received an answer; but when it came it
was, happily for Ulster, an acceptance. It is easy to understand Sir
Edward Carson's hesitation before consenting to assume the leadership.
After carrying all before him in the Irish Courts, where he had been Law
Officer of the Crown, he had migrated to London, where he had been
Solicitor-General during the last six years of the Unionist
Administration, and by 1910 had attained a position of supremacy at the
English Bar, with the certain prospect of the highest legal advancement,
and with an extremely lucrative practice, which his family circumstances
made it no light matter for him to sacrifice, but which he knew it would
be impossible for him to retain in conjunction with the political duties
he was now urged to undertake. Although only in his fifty-seventh year,
he was never one of those who feel younger than their age; nor did he
minimise in his own mind the disability caused by his too frequent
physical ailments, which inclined him to shrink from embarking upon