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