lves," 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."
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