The men walked slowly along in twos and threes, talking over the sermons they had just listened to; and the sermons, judging from the newspapers, were all cast in the same mould; and that mould gives so clearly the Orange attitude toward Home Rule, that I shall try to outline it here, quoting literally from the newspaper accounts.
Home Rule, then, according to the Belfast preachers, is a Papal-inspired movement, whose object is "to thrust out of their birthright over one million enterprising, industrious, and peaceable citizens, whose only crime was their loyalty to Crown and Constitution, and to put them under that Papal yoke from which their sires had purchased their liberty. Their beloved island home had never been more prosperous. They were grateful and they were satisfied, but their Roman Catholic fellow countrymen seemed to have no sense of satisfaction or gratitude. The Irish Nationalists had entered into a movement to sacrifice Protestantism upon the altar of Home Rule, but Orangemen and Protestants had entered into a covenant the object of which was the maintenance of their rightful heritage of British citizenship, of their commercial and industrial progress, and of their freedom. In the same spirit of patriotic Protestantism as was displayed at the siege of Derry, they would go forth to combat the onslaughts of Rome, and they would show that the same spirit lived in them as in their illustrious sires." Some of the services concluded with singing a new version of the National Anthem:
Ulster will never yield;
God is our strength and shield,
On Him we lean.
Free, loyal, true and brave,
Our liberties we'll save.
Home Rule we'll never have.
God save the King.
That last line is so perfunctory that it provokes a smile.
I am anxious to state the case against Home Rule as fairly as I can, the more so because, as the readers of this book must have suspected before this, I have little sympathy with the die-hard Unionists. I do not believe that they represent Ulster in any such absolute sense as they claim to do, for in the first place they hold only sixteen out of the thirty-three Ulster seats in Parliament, and in the second place, even in the four counties which are largely Protestant, there is a very strong Nationalist sentiment. My own conviction is that the Orange Societies are being be-fooled by a clique of politicians and aristocrats whose quarrel is not with Home Rule but with the Liberal party. Nobody denies that the funds for the organisation and equipment of the Orange army have been supplied by the Conservative party, whose campaign chest has been sadly depleted by the immense sums needed to keep the agitation going. Certain leaders of that party have done their utmost to foment religious and racial hatred, not because of any religious convictions of their own, nor because of any special sympathy for Ulster, but in the hope of overthrowing the government and stopping the march of social reform. They might just as well try to stop the march of time—and some day, perhaps, they will realise it!
And yet—
These fighting preachers, these uncompromising, wrong-headed, upright old Calvinists, are undoubtedly in earnest. The congregations which sat in grim-faced silence that day listening to this oratory, were in earnest, too. But I cannot believe that, in their inmost heart of hearts, they really dread the subversion of Protestantism. What they dread is, in the first place, some diminution of their supremacy in Irish politics, and, in the second place, some diminution of their control of Irish industry. In other words, the attack they really fear is against their pocket-books, not against their creed. And it is not impossible that their pocket-books may suffer; indeed, I think it probable that when the Home Rule Parliament has made its final adjustments of revenue, Ulster will be found to be bearing somewhat more of the burden than she now does, though perhaps not more than her just share. But this doesn't make the situation any the less serious, for ever since the world began it has been proved over and over again that the very surest way to drive men to frenzied resistance is to attack their pocket-books. As for the religious bogy, I personally believe most sincerely that it is a bogy. Such danger to Protestantism as exists comes, not from the Irish Catholics, but from the politicians who are using it as a football.
There was a sentence in one of the sermons preached that day to the effect that Irish Protestants laboured to help Irish Catholics to civil and religious liberty, when Irish Catholics were unable to help themselves, and this is a fact which I am sure Irish Catholics will be the last to forget. A century ago, Ulster was as fiercely Nationalist as she is fiercely Unionist to-day; it was in Belfast that the Society of United Irishmen was organised, and its leader was Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant, and its first members were Presbyterians, and one of its objects was Catholic Emancipation. And, as a close to these disconnected remarks, I cannot do better than repeat an anecdote I saw the other day in the Nineteenth Century. Some sympathetic neighbours called upon the mother of Sir David Baird to condole with her over her son's misfortunes, and they told her, with bated voices, how he had been captured by Tippoo Sultan, and chained to a soldier and thrust into a dungeon. Baird's mother listened silently, and then a little smile flitted across her lips.
"God help the laddie that's chained to my Davie!" she said softly.
And anybody that's chained to Ulster will undoubtedly have a strenuous time!