"The red blood will flow," prophesied Sir Edward Carson on 17.1.14.
"To coerce Ulster ... no right to ask army to undertake," decided Mr. Bonar Law. "Any officer who refuses is only doing his duty."
"The day I shall like best," said Sir Edward Carson on 20.6.14, less than six weeks before the beginning of war with Germany, "is the day upon which I am compelled, if I am compelled, to tell my men, 'You must mobilize.'"
"If the occasion arises," Mr. Bonar Law undertook on 28.9.14, eight weeks after war had broken out, "we shall support you to the last in any steps which Sir Edward Carson and your leaders think it necessary for you to take."[21]
While the leader of the unionist party, a former solicitor-general and the rising hope of the spent and broken tories were restrained from using language that could be borrowed by malcontents less highly placed, their followers imposed less check on the unaffected poetry of their natures.
"There is a spirit spreading abroad," declared Captain Craig (Morning Post, 9.1.11[22]), "which I can testify to from my personal knowledge that Germany and the German Emperor would be preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford and the Molly Maguires."
"If they were put out of the Union ...," proclaimed Major F. Crawford, a Larne gun-runner, on 29.4.12, "he would infinitely prefer to change his allegiance right over to the Emperor of Germany or any one else who had got a proper and stable government."
And even Mr. Bonar Law ventured to state, even in the House of Commons, on 1.1.13:
"It is a fact which I do not think any one who knows anything about Ireland will deny, that these people in the North-East of Ireland, from old prejudices perhaps more than from anything else, from the whole of their past history, would prefer, I believe, to accept the government of a foreign country rather than submit to be governed by hon. gentlemen below the gangway."