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 hostility to Home Rule, far from having slackened, as
enemies had alleged, had increased and solidified with the passing
years; they were men "animated by a unity of purpose, by a fixity of
resolution which nothing can shake and which must prove irresistible,"
to whom he would apply Cromwell's words to his Ironsides: "You are men
who know what you are fighting for, and love what you know." Then, after
an analysis of the practical evils that Home Rule would engender and the
benefits which legislative union secured, he again emphasised the lack
of mandate for the Government policy. His hearers, he said, "knew the
shameful story": how the Radicals had twice failed to obtain the
sanction of the British people for Home Rule, "and now for the third
time they were trying to carry it not only without the sanction, but