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 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.