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 elan 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