“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