The Correspondent of _The
Times_ declared that "it was hardly by hyperbole that Sir Edward Carson
claimed that it was one of the largest assemblies in the history of the
world."
But the moral effect of such gatherings is not to be gauged by numbers
alone. The demeanour of the people, which no organisation or stage
management could influence, impressed the English journalists and
Members of Parliament even more than the gigantic scale of the
demonstration. There was not a trace of the picnic spirit. There 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.
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