ings there was a military setting to the business of the day. At
Enniskillen Carson was conducted by a cavalry escort to the ground where
he was to address the people; at Coleraine, Portadown, and other places
volunteers lined the route and marched in column to and from the
meeting. They were, it is true, but "half-baked" levies, with more zeal
than knowledge of military duties. But competent critics--and there were
many such amongst the visitors--praised their bearing and physique and
the creditable measure of discipline they had already acquired. And it
must be remembered that in September 1912 the Ulster Volunteer Force was
still in its infancy. In the following two years its improvement in
efficiency was very marked; and within three years of the time when its
battalions paraded before Sir Edward Carson, with dummy rifles, and
marched before him to his meetings in Lisburn, Newtownards, Enniskillen,
and Belfast on the eve of the Covenant, those same men had gloriously
fought against the flower of the Prussian Army, and many of them had
fallen in the battle of the Somme.

The final meeting in the Ulster Hall on Friday the 27th of September was
an impressive climax to the tour. Many English journalists and other
visitors were present, and some of them admitted that, in spite of all
they had heard of what an Ulster Hall meeting was like, they were
astonished by the soul-stirring fervour they witnessed, and especially
by the wonderful spectacle presented at the overflow meeting in the
street outside, which was packed as far as the eye could reach in either
direction with upturned faces, eager to catch the words addressed to
them from a platform erected for the speakers outside an upper window of
the building.[36]

Messages of sympathy and approval at this supreme moment were read from
Mr. Bonar Law and Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Long, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Austen
Chamberlain. Then, after brief speeches by four local Belfast men, one
of whom was a representative of Labour, and while the audience were
waiting eagerly for the speech of their leader, there occurred what _The
Times_ next day described as "two entirely delightful, and, as far as
the crowd was concerned, two entirely unexpected episodes." The first
was the presentation to Sir Edward Carson of a faded yellow silk banner
by Colonel Wallace, Grand Master of the Belfast Orangemen, who explained
that it was the identical banner that had been carried before King
William III