THE ULSTERCONFtlCT its ifirst tentative steps towards forming the prerequisite of any aspirant state - a disciplined armed force. In March 1893, at the same time as the Ulster Unionist Clubs movement was being launched, an Ulster Defence Union was set up by Ulster parliamentary representatives and local businessmen to prepare armed resistance to Home Rule. The articulation of political debate by resort to weapons was scarcely new to Ulster or to Ireland as a whole. Muskets had played a role in Ulster rural disorders of the 1830s when even the poor had been enabled to huy weapons on the instalment plan through sectarian gun-clubs. The peasants involved in the rural migrations of the 1840s had taken their guns with them to Belfast (where, incidentally many of the weapons had been manufactured or imported) where they figured increasingly in the sectarian riots chronicled in the first part of this article, culminating in the thirty-two deaths of the 1886 Home Rule riots. The passage of the 2nd Home Rule Bill on Saturday April 22nd 1893 through the House of Commons was celebrated by the lighting of bonfires in Carrick Hill, a Catholic quarter of Belfast. The Sunday passed off peacefully, but on the Monday morning Protestant workers prevented many Catholics from working, especially in the Harland and Wolff shipyard. Soldiers and police were dispatched to the shipyard. gates but instead of the violent riot which was usually prompted by the appearance of the "forces of order", the Protestant workers marched through the town singing "God Save the Queen", with nobody being seriously injured. This peacefulness as compared with 1886 was due, in part, to the activities of the Unionist Clubs Council which organized a peace movement amongst its members; and due, in part, to the fact that a new channel had been created far the expression of militant Protestantism and anti-Nationalism. Three weeks before the passage of the Home Rule Bill, there had been a march past of 100,000 loyalists at which Balfour, who had been Irish seer..,. etary in the previous, Conservative, administration delivered this message in his speech: "I do not come here to preach any doctrines of passive obedience or non-resistance. The tyranny of majorities may be as bad as the tyranny of Kings and the stupidity of majorities may be even greater than the stupidity of Kings, and I do not think that any rational or sober man will say that what is justifiable against a tyranni.cal King may not, under 37
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