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.
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