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Page 25
Such is the laboratory in which the mind of Orange Ulster is prepared to
face the tasks of the twentieth century. Barbaric music, the ordinary
allowance of drum to fife being three to one, ritual dances, King
William on his white horse, the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills, a
grand parade of dead ideas and irrelevant ghosts called up in wild
speeches by clergymen and politicians--such is Orangeism in its full
heat of action. Can we, with this key to its intellectual history, be
really astonished that Shankhill Road should move all its life in a red
mist of superstition. The North of Ireland abounds in instances, trivial
and tragic, of this obsession. Here it is the case of the women of a
certain town who, in order to prevent their children from playing in a
dangerous swamp close by, have taught them that there are "wee Popes" in
it. There it is a case of man picked up, maimed and all but unconscious
after an accident, screwing up his lips to utter one last "To Hell with
the Pope!" before he dies. I remember listening in Court to the
examination of an old Orangeman who had been called as a witness to the
peaceable disposition of a friend of his. "What sort of man," asked the
counsel, "would you say Jamie Williamson is?" "A quiet, decent man." "Is
he the sort of man that would be likely to be breaking windows?" "No man
less likely." "Is he the sort of man that you would expect to find at
the head of a mob shouting, 'To Hell with the Pope'?" Witness, with
great emphasis: "No. Certainly not. Jamie was never any ways a
_religious_ man." These bewildering corruptions of sense and sanity
overwhelm you at every turn. Ask your neighbour offhand at a dinner in
Dublin: "What is so-and-so, by the way?" He will reply that so-and-so is
a doctor, or a government official, or a stockbroker, as it may happen.
Ask him the same question at a dinner in Belfast, and he will
automatically tell you that so-and-so is a Protestant or a "Papist."
The plain truth is that it would be difficult to find anywhere a more
shameful exploitation, intellectual and economic, than that which has
been practised on the Ulster Orangeman by his feudal masters. Were I to
retort the abuse, with which my own creed is daily bespattered, I should
describe him further as the only victim of clerical obscurantism to be
found in Ireland. Herded behind the unbridged waters of the Boyne, he
has been forced to live in a very Tibet of intellectual isolation.
Whenever he moved in his thoughts a little towards that Ireland to
which, for all his separatism, he so inseparably belongs, the ring of
blockhouses, called Orange Lodges, was drawn tighter to strangle his
wanderings. Mr Robert Lynd in his "Home Life in Ireland," a book which
ought to have been mentioned earlier in these pages, relates the case
of a young man who was refused ordination in the Presbyterian Church
because he had permitted himself to doubt whether the Pope was in fact
anti-Christ. And he writes with melancholy truth:
"If the Presbyterian clergy had loved Ireland as much as they have
hated Rome they could have made Ulster a home of intellectual
energy and spiritual buoyancy long ago. They have preferred to keep
Ulster dead to fine ideas rather than risk the appearance of a few
unsettling ideas among the rest."
It has not been, one likes to think, a death, consummated and final, but
rather an interruption of consciousness from which recovery is possible.
Drugged with a poisonous essence, distilled from history for him by his
exploiters, the Orangeman of the people has lived in a world of
phantoms. In politics he has never in his whole career spoken for
himself. The Catholic peasant comes to articulate, personal speech in
Davitt; the national aristocracy in Parnell. The industrial worker
discovers within his own camp a multitude of captains. Even landlordism,
although it has produced no leader, has produced many able spokesmen.
Every other section in Ireland enriches public life with an interpreter
of its mind sprung from its own ranks. Orange Ulster alone has never yet
given to its own democracy a democratic leader. This is indeed the
cardinal misfortune, as well as the central secret, of Ulster Unionism.
The pivot on which it turns resides, not in the farms of Down or the
factories of Belfast, but in the Library of the Four Courts. Of the
nineteen representatives who speak for it in Parliament no fewer than
seven are King's Counsel. In the whole list there is not one delegate of
labour, nor one farmer. A party so constituted is bound to produce
prodigies of nonsense such as those associated with Sir Edward Carson.
The leaders of the orchestra openly despise the instruments on which
they play. For followers, reared in the tradition of hysteria depicted
above, no raw-head is thought to be too raw, and no bloody-bones too
bloody. And so we have King's Counsel, learned in the law, devising
Provisional Governments, and Privy Councillors wallowing in imaginative
treason. As for the Bishops, they will talk daggers as luridly as the
rest, but they will not even threaten to use any. And so does the pagan
rage, and the heathen prophesy vain things.
That such a farce-tragedy can find a stage in the twentieth century is
pitiable. But it is not a serious political fact. It has the same
relation to reality that the cap-hunting exploits of Tartarin of
Tarascon had to the Franco-German war. It has been devised merely to
make flesh creep in certain tabernacles of fanaticism in the less
civilised parts of England and Scotland. So far as action goes it will
end in smoke, but not in gunpowder-smoke. There will no doubt be riots
in Belfast and Portadown, for which the ultimate responsibility will
rest on learned counsel of the King. But there have been riots before,
and the cause of Home Rule has survived all the blackguardism and
bloodshed. It is lamentable that ministers of the gospel of Christ and
leaders of public opinion should so inflame and exploit the
superstitions of ignorant men; but not by these methods will justice be
intimidated.
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