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