At the last moment the Government announced that the Bill would not be presented till the 11th of April, after Parliament reassembled, and its provisions were therefore still unknown when the demonstration took place on the 9th in the Show Ground of the Royal Agricultural Society at Balmoral, a suburb of Belfast.
Feeling ran high as the date of the double event approached, and the indignant sense of wrong that prevailed in Ulster was finely voiced in a poem, entitled "Ulster 1912," written by Mr.Kipling for the occasion which appeared in _The Morning Post_ on the day of the Balmoral demonstration, of which the first and last stanzas were: "The dark eleventh hour Draws on, and sees us sold To every evil Power We fought against of old.
Rebellion, rapine, hate, Oppression, wrong, and greed Are loosed to rule our fate, By England's act and deed.
"Believe, we dare not boast, Believe, we do not fear-- We stand to pay the cost In all that men hold dear.
What answer from the North?
One Law, One Land, One Throne.
If England drive us forth We shall not fall alone!" The preparations for the Unionist leader's coming visit to Belfast had excited the keenest interest throughout England and Scotland.

Coinciding as it did with the introduction of the Government's Bill, it was recognised to be the formal countersigning by the whole Unionist Party of Great Britain of Ulster's proclamation of her determination to resist her forcible degradation in constitutional status.

The same note of mingled reproach and defiance which sounded in Kipling's verses was heard in the grave warning addressed by _The Times_ to the country in a leading article on the morning of the meeting: "Nobody of common judgment and common knowledge of political movements can honestly doubt the exceptional gravity of the occasion, and least of all can any such doubt be felt by any who know the men of Ulster.

To make light of the deep-rooted convictions which fill the minds of those who will listen to Mr.
Bonar Law to-day is a shallow and an idle affectation, or a token of levity and of ignorance.

Enlightened Liberalism may smile at the beliefs and the passions of the Ulster Protestants, but it was those same beliefs and passions, in the forefathers of the men who will gather in Belfast to-day, which saved Ireland for the British Crown, and freed the cause of civil and religious liberty in these islands from its last dangerous foes....