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.

And if “Ulster” does fight after all?  In that event we must only remember how sorry George Stephenson was for the cow.  The military traditions of the Protestant North are not very alarming.  The contribution of the Enniskilleners to the Battle of the Boyne appears to have consisted in running away with great energy and discretion.  Nor did they, or their associates, in later years shed any great lustre even on Imperial arms.  I have never heard that the Connaught Rangers had many recruits from the Shankhill Road, or the Dublin Fusiliers from Portadown; consequently the present situation disgusts rather than terrifies us.  If rifle-levers ever click in rebellion against a Home Rule government, duly established by statute under the authority of the Crown, it will be astonishing to find that every bullet in Ireland is a member of an Orange Lodge.  If “Ulster” repudiates the arbitrament of reason, and the verdict of a free ballot, she simply puts herself outside the law.  And she may be quite assured that the law, driven back on its ultimate sanction of force, will very sharply and very amply vindicate itself.