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.
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