by side found it difficult to make its way to the Reform Club, the headquarters of what had once been Ulster Liberalism, where an address was presented in which it was stated that the conduct of the Government “will justify loyal Ulster in resorting to the most extreme measures in resisting Home Rule.”  In his reply Mr. Bonar Law gave them “on behalf of the Unionist Party this message—­though the brunt of the battle will be yours, there will not be wanting help from ‘across the Channel.’” At Comber, where a stop was made on the way to Mount Stewart, he asked himself how Radical Scotsmen would like to be treated as the Government were treating Protestant Ulster.  “I know Scotland well,” he replied to his own question, “and I believe that, rather than submit to such fate, the Scottish people would face a second Bannockburn or a second Flodden.”

These few quotations from the first utterances of Mr. Bonar Law on his arrival are sufficient to show how complete was the understanding between him and the Ulster people even before the great demonstration of the following day.  He had, as The Times Correspondent noted, “already found favour with the Belfast crowd.  All the way from Larne by train to Belfast and through Belfast by motor-car to Newtownards and Mount Stewart, his progress was a triumph.”

The remarks of the same experienced observer on the eve of the Balmoral meeting are worth recording, especially as his anticipations were amply fulfilled.

“To-morrow’s demonstration,” he telegraphed from Belfast, “both in numbers and enthusiasm, promises to be the most remarkable ever seen in Ireland.  If expectations are realised the assemblage of men will be twice as numerous as the whole white population of the Witwatersrand, whose grievances led to the South African War, and they will represent a community greater in numbers than the white population of South Africa as a whole.  Unless all the signs are misleading, it will be the demonstration of a community in the deadliest earnest.  By the Protestant community of Ulster, Home Rule is regarded as a menace to their faith, to their material well-being and prosperity, and to their freedom and national traditions, and thus all the most potent motives which in history have stirred men to their greatest efforts are here in operation.”

No written description, unless by the pen of some gifted imaginative writer, could convey any true impression of the scenes that were witnessed the following day in the Show Ground at Balmoral and the roads leading to it from the heart of the city.  The photographs published at the time give some idea of the apparently unbounded ocean of earnest, upturned faces, closely packed round the several platforms, and stretching away far into a dim and distant background; but even they could not record the impressive stillness of the vast multitude, its orderliness, which required the presence of not a single policeman, its spirit