ere was no
drunkenness, no noisy buffoonery, no unseemly behaviour. The Ulster
habit of combining politics and prayer--which was not departed from at
Balmoral, where the proceedings were opened by the Primate of All
Ireland and the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church--was jeered at by
people who never witnessed an Ulster loyalist meeting; but the Editor of
_The Observer_, himself a Roman Catholic, remarked with more insight
that "the Protestant mind does not use prayer simply as part of a
parade;" and _The Times_ Correspondent, who has already been more than
once quoted, was struck by the fervour with which at Balmoral "the whole
of the vast gathering joined in singing the 90th Psalm," and he added
the very just comment that "it is the custom in Ulster to mark in this
solemn manner the serious nature of the issue when the Union is the
question, as something different from a question of mere party
politics."

The spectacular aspect of the demonstration was admirably managed. A
saluting point was so arranged that the procession, on entering the
enclosure, could divide into two columns, one passing each side of a
small pavilion where Mr. Bonar Law, Sir Edward Carson, Lord Londonderry,
and Mr. Walter Long stood to take the salute before proceeding to the
stand which held the principal platform for the delivery of the
speeches. In the centre of the ground was a signalling-tower with a
flagstaff 90 feet high, on which a Union Jack measuring 48 feet by 25
and said to be the largest ever woven, was broken at the moment when the
Resolution against Home Rule was put to the meeting.

Mr. Bonar Law, visibly moved by the scene before him, made a speech that
profoundly affected his audience, although it was characteristically
free from rhetorical display. A recent incident in Dublin, where the
sight of the British Flag flying within view of a Nationalist meeting
had been denounced as "an intolerable insult," supplied him, when he
compared it with the spectacle presented by the meeting, with an apt
illustration of the contrast between "the two nations" in Ireland--the
loyal and the disloyal. He told the Ulstermen that he had come to them
as the leader of the Unionist Party to give them the assurance that
"that party regard your cause, not as yours alone, nor as ours alone,
but as the cause of the Empire"; the meeting, which he had expected to
be a great gathering but which far exceeded his expectation, proved
that Ulster's hostilit