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Page 28
The truth is that in order to test our tolerance Orangeism proposes to
us a series of exercises which are a very delirium of intolerance.
"Sever yourselves," it says in effect to us, "from all allegiance to
that Italian Cardinal. Consign him, as Portadown does, to hell. Bait
your bishops. Deride the spiritual authority of your priests. Then shall
we know that you are men and masters of your own consciences. Elect a
Unionist Council in every county, a Unionist Corporation in Dublin, then
shall we know that you are brothers. Disown your dead leaders. Spit on
the grave of Emmet. Teach your children that every Fenian was a
murderer. Erase from your chronicles the name of Parnell. Then shall we
know that you are loyal."
It has been occasionally urged by writers who prefer phrases to
actualities that Home Rule must wait on the conversion of "Ulster."
Therein the patient must minister to himself. Miracles of that order
cannot be accomplished from without. Great is Diana of the Ephesians,
and the servitude of tradition is at an end only when the hands that
fashioned the idols shatter them on the altars of a new nobleness. Let
us distinguish. The Orangeism which is merely an instrument of
exploitation and domination will not yield to reason. The Orangeism
which is an inherited hysteria will not yield to reason. It Bourbonises
too much. It lives in the past, learning nothing and forgetting nothing.
Argument runs off it like rain off a duck's back. These two types of
thought we must leave to the grace of God, and the education of the
accomplished fact. They represent a declining cause, and a decaying
party. The Lodges once mustered more than 200,000 members; they have
now less than 10,000. There is another kind of Orangeism, that which has
begun to think, and the Orangeism that has begun to think is already
converted. I said that Protestant "Ulster" had never given to its own
democracy a leader, but to say that is to forget John Mitchel. Master in
prose of a passion as intense as Carlyle's and far less cloudy, of an
irony not excelled by Swift, Mitchel flung into the tabernacles of his
own people during the Great Famine a sentence that meant not peace but a
sword. He taught them, as no one since, that Orangeism was merely a
weapon of exploitation. While the band played "The Boyne Water" and the
people cheered it, the landlords were picking the pockets of the
ecstatic crowd.
"The Pope, we know, is the 'man of sin,'" wrote Mitchel, "and the
'Antichrist,' and also, if you like, the 'mystery of iniquity,' and
all that, but he brings no ejectments in Ireland."
Mitchel travelled too fast for co-religionists whose shoulders had not
yet slipped the burden of old superstitions. The �lan of genius and the
call of freedom drew him out of the home of his fathers to consort with
Papists, rebels, and transported convicts. But his failure was the seed
of later success. In a few years the League of North and South was able
to unite Protestant and Catholic on the plain economic issue that
landlordism must go. That too failed, but the stream of democratic
thought had been merely driven underground to reappear further on in the
century. In the elections that shook the fortress of Toryism in Ulster
in the seventies Catholic priests marched at the head of processions
side by side with Grand Masters of Orange Lodges. In the first years of
the Land League, Michael Davitt was able to secure the enthusiastic
support of purely Orange meetings in Armagh. Still later, Mr T. W.
Russell, at the head of a democratic coalition, smashed the old
Ascendancy on the question of compulsory purchase, and Mr Lindsay
Crawford founded his Independent Order, a portent if not yet a power. So
much has been done in the country. But it is in the cities, those
workshops of the society of the future, that the change is most marked.
The new movement finds an apt epitome in the political career of Mr
Joseph Devlin. The workers of Belfast had been accustomed to see labour
problems treated by the old type of Unionist member of parliament either
with cowardice or with contempt. _Enfin Malesherbes vint_. At last a
man rose up out of their own class, although a Catholic and a
Nationalist. He spoke with an awakening eloquence, and he made good his
words. In every industrial struggle in that sweated city he interposed
his strong word to demand justice for the wage-earner. This was a new
sort of politics. It bore fruit where Ulster Unionism had been but a
barren fig-tree. The democracy of Belfast accepted their leader. They
gave him a majority of 16 in West Belfast in 1906 and in four years they
had multiplied it by forty. The Boyne was bridged, and everything that
has since happened has but added a new stay or girder to the strength of
the bridge. And not only labour but capital has passed across that
estranging river to firm ground of patriotism and national unity. Lord
Pirrie, the head of the greatest manufacturing enterprise in Belfast, is
an ardent Home Ruler. Business men, ministers of religion, even lawyers,
are thinking out things quietly beneath the surface. The new "Ulster" is
breaking its shell. Parties are forming on the basis of economic
realities, not on that of "religious" phantasms.
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