THE HALLUCINATION OF "ULSTER"
Ulster Unionism, in the leaders, is not so much a programme of ideas as
a demand for domination. In the rank and file it is largely a phenomenon
of hysteria. I do not know whether my readers have ever participated in
an agreeable game known as odd man out. Each player tosses a penny, and
whoever disagrees with the rest, showing a head to their tails or vice
versa, captures the pool. Such is in all essential particulars the
"Ulster Question." We find ourselves there in presence of a minority
which, on the sole ground that it is a minority, claims that in the
government of Ireland it shall be not merely secure but supreme. Sir
Edward Carson as odd man out (and I do not deny that he is odd enough
for anything) is to be Dictator of Ireland. If eighty-four Irish
constituencies declare for Home Rule, and nineteen against Home Rule,
then, according to the mathematics of Unionism, the Noes have it. In
their non-Euclidean geometry the part is always greater than the whole.
In their unnatural history the tail always wags the dog. On the plane of
politics it is not necessary to press the case against "Ulster" any
farther than that. Even majorities have their rights. If a plurality of
nine to two is not sufficient to determine policy and conduct business
in a modern nation, then there is no other choice except anarchy, or
rather an insane atomism. Not merely every party, but every household
and, in last resort, every individual will end as a Provisional
Government. Separatism of this type is a very ecstasy of nonsense, and
none of my readers will think so cheaply of his own intelligence as to
stay to discuss it. It is in other terms that we must handle the problem
of "Ulster."
The existence in certain nooks and corners of Ireland of a democratic
vote hostile to Home Rule is, let us confess, a conundrum. But it is a
conundrum of psychology rather than of politics. It may seem rude to say
so, but Orangeism consists mainly of a settled hallucination and an
annual brainstorm. No one who has not been present at a Twelfth of July
procession can realise how completely all its manifestations belong to
the life of hysteria and not to that of reason. M. Paul-Dubois, whom we
may summon out of a cloud of witnesses, writes of them as "demagogic
orgies with a mixed inspiration of Freemasonry and the Salvation Army."
The Twelfth of July is, or rather was, for its fine furies are now much
abated, a savage carnival comparable only to the corroborees of certain
primitive tribes.
"A monster procession," continues M. Paul-Dubois, "marches through
Belfast, as through every town and village of Orange Ulster, ending
up with a vast meeting at which the glories of William of Orange
and the reverses of James II. are celebrated in song.... Each
'lodge' sends its delegation to the procession with banners and
drums. On the flags are various devices: 'Diamond Heroes,' 'True
Blues,' 'No Pope.' The participants give themselves over to
character dances, shouting out their favourite songs: 'The Boyne
Water' and 'Croppies Lie Down.' The chief part is played by the
drummers, the giants of each 'lodge,' who with bared arms beat
their drums with holy fury, their fists running with blood, until
the first drum breaks and many more after it, until in the evening
they fall half-dead in an excess of frenzy."
Such is the laboratory in which the mind of Orange Ulster is prepared to
face the tasks of the twentieth century. Barbaric music, the ordinary
allowance of drum to fife being three to one, ritual dances, King
William on his white horse, the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills, a
grand parade of dead ideas and irrelevant ghosts called up in wild
speeches by clergymen and politicians--such is Orangeism in its full
heat of action. Can we, with this key to its intellectual history, be
really astonished that Shankhill Road should move all its life in a red
mist of superstition. The North of Ireland abounds in instances, trivial
and tragic, of this obsession. Here it is the case of the women of a
certain town who, in order to prevent their children from playing in a
dangerous swamp close by, have taught them that there are "wee Popes" in
it. There it is a case of man picked up, maimed and all but unconscious
after an accident, screwing up his lips to utter one last "To Hell with
the Pope!" before he dies. I remember listening in Court to the
examination of an old Orangeman who had been called as a witness to the
peaceable disposition of a friend of his. "What sort of man," asked the
counsel, "would you say Jamie Williamson is?" "A quiet, decent man." "Is
he the sort of man that would be likely to be breaking windows?" "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 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.
But it is not courteous to the reader to detain him among such
unrealities as Sir Edward Carson's Civil War. Treason, that is to say
platform treason, is not so much an eccentricity as a habit of
Orangeism. It is a way they have in the Lodges, and their past history
supplies a corrective to their present outburst. Perhaps their most
notable exploit in armed loyalty was their attempt to dethrone, or
rather to defeat in succession to the throne, Queen Victoria. This is a
chapter in their history with regard to which they are far too modest
and reticent.
But the leading case in recent years is of course the attitude of the
Lodges towards the Disestablishment of the Irish Episcopal Church in
1869. The records are singularly rich in what I may perhaps call
Carsonese. Dukes threatened to "fight as men alone can fight who have
the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other." Learned counsel of
the Queen covenanted to "seal their protest with their blood in
martyrdom and battle." Ministers of the gospel were all for kicking the
Crown into the Boyne, keeping their powder dry, shouldering Minié
rifles, and finally joining the lawyers in the red grave of martyrdom.
An Ulster poet (a satirist one fears) wrote a famous invocation to the
statue of Mr Walker near Derry, beginning:
"Come down out o' that, Mr Walker,
There's work to be done by-and-by,
And this is no time to stand glowerin'
Betwixt the bog-side and the sky."
But Mr Walker did not come down: he remained on his safe pinnacle of
immortality. And of course there was no civil war. That period was wiser
than our own in one respect: nobody of any common sense thought of
spoiling such exquisite blague by taking it seriously. Its motive was
universally understood in Ireland. The orators of the movement never for
a moment dreamed of levying war on Mr Gladstone, but they were
determined to levy blackmail. They saw that they could bluff English
opinion into granting all manner of extravagant compensation for the
extinction of their privileges and their ascendancy, if only the Orange
drum was beaten loudly enough. It was a case of the more cry the more
wool. And in point of fact they succeeded. They obtained financial
arrangements of the most generous character, and, thereafter, the
battle-flags were furled. Within five years of Disestablishment the
Episcopalian Synod was praising it as the happiest event in the life of
that Church. The lawyers, being denied the martyrdom of the battlefield,
stolidly accepted that of promotion to the judicial bench, and a holy
silence descended on the divines.
This strategy having succeeded so admirably in 1868 is repeated in 1912.
"Ulster" has not the least intention of raising war or the sinews of
war; her interest is in the sinews of peace. Although she does not hold
a winning card in her hand she hopes to scoop the pool by a superb
bluff. By menaces of rebellion she expects to be able to insist that
under Home Rule she shall continue encased in an impenetrable armour of
privileges, preferences, and safeguards. She is all the more likely to
succeed because of the tenderness of Nationalist Ireland in her regard.
Short of the absolute surrender by the majority of every shred of its
rights (which is, of course, what is demanded) there are very few
safeguards that we are not prepared to concede to the superstition, the
egotism, or even the actual greed of the Orangemen. But it may as well
be understood that we are not to be either duped or bullied.
If the policy of Ulster Unionism is unreal there is no word in any
language that can describe the phantasmal nature of the grounds on which
it professes to fear national freedom. Home Rule, declare the orators,
will obviously mean Rome Rule. The _Ne Temere_ decree will de-legitimise
every Protestant in the country. The Dublin Parliament will tax every
"Ulster" industry out of existence. One is told that not only do many
people say, but that some people even believe things of this kind. But
then there are people who believe that they are made of Dresden china,
and will break if they knock against a chair. These latter are to be
found in lunatic asylums. It is indeed particularly worth noting that
when a man begins to see in the whole movement of the world a conspiracy
to oppress and injure him our first step is to inquire not into his
grievance but into his sanity. One finds the same difficulty in
discussing Irish politics in terms of the three hallucinations specified
that one finds in discussing, say, Rugby football with a Dresden-china
fellow-citizen. It is better not to make the attempt, but to substitute
a plain statement of obvious facts.
In the first place, even if any policy of oppression were in our minds,
it is not in our power. The overlordship of the Imperial Parliament
remains in any scheme of Home Rule unimpaired, and any man damnified
because of his religion can appeal in last resort to the Imperial Army
and Navy. Shankhill Road is mathematically safe. After all there are in
England some forty millions of Protestants who, whatever their religious
temperature may be, will certainly decline to see Protestantism
penalised. The Protestants in Ireland have a million and a quarter, and
they make noise enough for twice the number. There are about three and a
quarter millions of Irish Catholics. History concedes to Catholic
Ireland the cleanest record in respect of religious tolerance to be
found anywhere in Europe. We never martyred a saint, and amid all the
witch-hunting devilries of Scotland and England we burned only one
witch, a namesake of my own. Deny or suppress all this. Imagine into
the eyes of every Catholic neighbour the slumbering but unquenched fires
of Smithfield. But be good enough to respect mathematics. Do not suggest
that the martial qualities induced by the two religions are so
dissimilar that two Catholics are capable of imposing Home Rule on
twenty-five Protestants.
The suggestion that we shall overtax "Ulster" is even more captivating.
But how are we to do it? Of course we might schedule the sites given up
to Protestant church buildings as undeveloped land. Or we might issue
income-tax forms with an assessment printed on one side, and the decrees
of the Council of Trent on the other. Or we might insist on every orator
desirous of uttering that ennobling sentiment, "To Hell with the Pope!"
taking out a licence, and charge him a small fee. Positive treason, such
as the proclamation of Provisional Governments, would of course pay a
higher rate. All these would be most interesting experiments, and would
add a picturesque touch to the conventionality of modern administration.
But if we were to overtax sugar or coffee, corn or butter, flax or wool,
beer or spirits, land or houses, I fear that we should be beating
ourselves rather severely with our own sticks. Our revenge on "Ulster"
would be rather like that of Savage, the poet, who revenged himself on
a friend by sleeping out the whole of a December night on a bridge. The
whole suggestion is, of course, futile and fantastic. It is a bubble
that has been pricked, and by no one so thoroughly as by Lord Pirrie,
the head of Harland and Wolff, that is to say the leader of the
industrial North.
The clamour of the exploiters of "Ulster" is motived on this point by
two considerations, the one an illusion, the other a reality. The
illusion, or rather the pretence, consists in representing the Unionists
as the sole holders of wealth in Ireland. It would be a sufficient
refutation of this view to quote those other passages in which the same
orators assert with equal eloquence that the Tory policy of land
purchase and resolute government from Westminster has brought enormous
prosperity to the rest of the country. On _per capita_ valuation the
highest northern county ranks only twelfth in Ireland. It is the
reality, however, that supplies the clue. While the masters of Orangeism
do not represent the wealth of Ireland they do certainly represent the
largest, or, at least, the most intense concentration of unearned
incomes. What they fear is not unjust but democratic taxation. They
cling to the Union as a bulwark against the reform movement which in
every modern state is resuming for society a small part of certain vast
fortunes which in their essence have been socially created. But even on
the plane of their own selfishness they are following a foolish line of
action. The Union did not save them from the Land Tax Budget, nor, as
regards the future, is salvation of the English Tories. Should they ever
return to power they will repeat their action respecting the Death
Duties. Having in Opposition denounced the land taxes with indecent
bitterness they will, when back in office, confirm and extend them.
"Ulster" had far better cast in her lot with Ireland. She will find an
Irish Assembly not only strikingly but, one might almost add, sinfully
conservative in matters of taxation. As to the conflict between the
agrarian and the manufacturing interests, that also exists in every
nation on the earth. But neither has any greater temptation to plan the
destruction of the other than a merchant has to murder his best
customer.
There remains the weltering problem of mixed marriages and the _Ne
Temere_ decree. It is perhaps worth observing that marriages get mixed
in other countries as well as in Ireland. It grieves one that men should
differ as to the true religious interpretation of life. But they do in
fact differ, and wherever two human beings, holding strongly to
different faiths, fall in love there is tragic material. But they do in
fact fall in love. The theme recurs, with a thousand reverberations, in
the novel literature of England, France, and Germany. The situation
occurs also in Ireland. But I am bewildered to know in what way it is an
argument for or against Home Rule. Let us appeal once more to colonial
experience and practice. There is a Catholic majority in Canada and an
overwhelming Catholic majority in Quebec. The policy of the Catholic
Church towards mixed marriages is precisely the same there as in
Ireland. Does Protestantism demand that the constitutions of the
Dominion and the Province respectively shall be withdrawn? Since no such
claim is made we must conclude that the outcry on Orange platforms is
designed not to enforce a principle but to awaken all the slumbering
fires of prejudice. The _Ne Temere_ decree introduces no new departure.
Now, as always, the Catholic Church requires simply that her members
shall consecrate the supreme adventure of life with the Sacrament of
their fathers before the altar of their fathers. It is strange that the
Orangemen, believing as they do that the Pope is anti-Christ, should be
so annoyed at finding that the Pope teaches a doctrine different from
theirs on the subject of marriage. The Pope can inflict no spiritual
penalties on them since they are outside his flock. He can inflict no
civil penalties on anybody. There is undoubtedly in the matter of
divorce a sharp conflict between Catholic ideas and the practice and
opinion of Protestant countries. That exists, and will continue, under
every variation of government. It is an eternal antinomy. But whom does
it aggrieve? We Catholics voluntarily abjure the blessings of divorce,
but we should never dream of using the civil law to impose our
abnegation on those of another belief. If there is any doubt upon that
point it can very easily be removed. The civil law of marriage can be
conserved under one of the "safeguards."
The truth is that in order to test our tolerance Orangeism proposes to
us a series of exercises which are a very delirium of intolerance.
"Sever yourselves," it says in effect to us, "from all allegiance to
that Italian Cardinal. Consign him, as Portadown does, to hell. Bait
your bishops. Deride the spiritual authority of your priests. Then shall
we know that you are men and masters of your own consciences. Elect a
Unionist Council in every county, a Unionist Corporation in Dublin, then
shall we know that you are brothers. Disown your dead leaders. Spit on
the grave of Emmet. Teach your children that every Fenian was a
murderer. Erase from your chronicles the name of Parnell. Then shall we
know that you are loyal."
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 élan 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 Order, a portent if not yet a power. So
much has been done in the country. But it is in the cities, those
workshops of the society of the future, that the change is most marked.
The new movement finds an apt epitome in the political career of Mr
Joseph Devlin. The workers of Belfast had been accustomed to see labour
problems treated by the old type of Unionist member of parliament either
with cowardice or with contempt. _Enfin Malesherbes vint_. At last a
man rose up out of their own class, although a Catholic and a
Nationalist. He spoke with an awakening eloquence, and he made good his
words. In every industrial struggle in that sweated city he interposed
his strong word to demand justice for the wage-earner. This was a new
sort of politics. It bore fruit where Ulster Unionism had been but a
barren fig-tree. The democracy of Belfast accepted their leader. They
gave him a majority of 16 in West Belfast in 1906 and in four years they
had multiplied it by forty. The Boyne was bridged, and everything that
has since happened has but added a new stay or girder to the strength of
the bridge. And not only labour but capital has passed across that
estranging river to firm ground of patriotism and national unity. Lord
Pirrie, the head of the greatest manufacturing enterprise in Belfast, is
an ardent Home Ruler. Business men, ministers of religion, even lawyers,
are thinking out things quietly beneath the surface. The new "Ulster" is
breaking its shell. Parties are forming on the basis of economic
realities, not on that of "religious" phantasms.
As for the old "Ulster," it remains a problem not for the War Office,
but for the Department of Education.