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 against the will, of the British people.”

The peroration which followed made an irresistible appeal to a people always mindful of the glories of the relief of Derry.  Mr. Bonar Law warned them that the Ministerial majority in the House of Commons, “now cemented by L400 a year,” could not be broken up, but would have their own way.  He therefore said to them: 

“With all solemnity—­you must trust in yourselves.  Once again you hold the pass—­the pass for the Empire.  You are a besieged city.  The timid have left you; your Lundys have betrayed you; but you have closed your gates.  The Government have erected by their Parliament Act a boom against you to shut you off from the help of the British people.  You will burst that boom.  That help will come, and when the crisis is over men will say to you in words not unlike those used by Pitt—­you have saved yourselves by your exertions and you will save the Empire by your example.”

The overwhelming ovation with which Sir Edward Carson was received upon taking the president’s chair at the chief platform, in the absence through illness of the Duke of Abercorn, proved that he had already won the confidence and the affection of the Ulster people to a degree that seemed to leave little room for growth, although every subsequent appearance he