fresh work the extent and nature of which could not be exactly foreseen.
As to ambition, there are few men who ever were less moved by it, but he
could not leave altogether out of consideration his firm
conviction--which ultimately proved to have been ill-founded--that
acceptance of the Ulster leadership would cut him off from all
promotion, whether political or legal.[11]

Moreover, although for the moment it was the leadership of a
parliamentary group to which he was formally invited, it was obvious
that much more was really involved; the people in Ulster itself needed
guidance in the crisis that was visibly approaching. Ever since Lord
Randolph Churchill, with the concurrence of Lord Salisbury, first
inspired them in 1886 with the spirit of resistance in the last resort
to being placed under a Dublin Parliament, and assured them of British
sympathy and support if driven to that extremity, the determination of
Ulster in this respect was known to all who had any familiarity with the
temper of her people. Any man who undertook to lead them at such a
juncture as had been reached in 1910 must make that determination the
starting-point of his policy. It was a task that would require not only
statesmanship, but political courage of a high order. Lord Randolph
Churchill, in his famous Ulster Hall speech, had said that "no
portentous change such as the repeal of the Union, no change so
gigantic, could be accomplished by the mere passing of a law; the
history of the United States will teach us a different lesson." Ulster
always took her stand on the American precedent, though the exemplar was
Lincoln rather than Washington. But although the scale of operations
was, of course, infinitely smaller, the Ulster leader would, if it came
to the worst, be confronted by certain difficulties from which Abraham
Lincoln was free. He might have to follow the example of the latter in
forcibly resisting secession, but his legal position would be very