" So, too, when His Majesty told the Ulster Parliament that he
"felt assured they would do their utmost to make it an instrument of
happiness and good government for all parts of the community which they
represented," the Ulster people believed that the King's confidence in
them would not prove to have been misplaced.
Happily, no prophetic vision of those things that were shortly to come
to pass broke in to disturb the sense of satisfaction with the haven
that had been reached. The future, with its treachery, its alarms, its
fresh causes of uncertainty and of conflict, was mercifully hidden from
the eyes of the Ulster people when they acclaimed the inauguration of
their Parliament by their King. They accepted responsibility for the
efficient working of institutions thus placed in their keeping by the
highest constitutional Authority in the British Empire, although they
had never asked for them, and still believed that the system they had
been driven to abandon was better than the new; and they opened this
fresh chapter in their history in firm faith that what had received so
striking a token of the Sovereign's sympathy and approval would never be
taken from them except with their own consent.
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