He reminded the audience that hitherto the promise of support to Ulster by the Unionists of Great Britain, given long before at Blenheim, had been coupled with the condition that, if an appeal were made to the electorate, the Unionist Party would bow to the verdict of the country. "But now," he went on, "after the way in which advantage has been taken of your patriotism, I say to you, and I say it with the full authority of our party, we give the pledge without any condition." During the two days which he spent in Belfast Mr. Bonar Law, and other visitors from England, paid visits to the training camps at Newcastle and Ballykinler, where the 1st Brigade of the Ulster Division was undergoing training for the front. Both now, and for some time to come, there was a good deal of unworthy political jealousy of the Division, which showed itself in a tendency to belittle the recruiting figures from Ulster, and in sneers in the Nationalist Press at the delay in sending to the front a body of troops whose friends had advertised their supposed efficiency before the war. These troops were themselves fretting to get to France; and they believed, rightly or wrongly, that political intrigue was at work to keep them ingloriously at home, while other Divisions, lacking their preliminary training, were receiving preference in the supply of equipment. One small circumstance, arising out of the conditions in which "Kitchener's Army" had to be raised, afforded genuine enjoyment in Ulster. Men were enlisting far more rapidly than the factories could provide arms, uniforms, and other equipment. Rifles for teaching the recruits to drill and manoeuvre were a long way short of requirements. It was a great joy to the Ulstermen when the War Office borrowed their much-ridiculed "dummy rifles" and "wooden guns," and took them to English training camps for use by the "New Army." But this volume is not concerned with the conduct of the Great War, nor is it necessary to enter in detail into the controversy that arose as to the efforts of the rest of Ireland, in comparison with those of Ulster, to serve the Empire in the hour of need. It will be sufficient to cite the testimony of two authorities, neither of whom can be suspected of bias on the side of Ulster. The chronicler of the _Annual Register_ records that: "In Ulster, as in England, the flow of recruits outran the provision made for them by the War Office, and by about the middle of October the Protestant districts had furnished some 21,000, of which Belfast alone had contributed 7,581, or 305 per 10,000 of the population--the highest proportion of all the towns in the United Kingdom."[91] The second witness is the democratic orator who took a foremost part in the House of Commons in denouncing the Curragh officers who resigned their Commissions rather than march against Ulster. Colonel John Ward, M.P., writing two years after the war, in which he had not kept his eyes shut, said: