"
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.
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