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