HOME RULE DIFFICULTIES[ToC]
"Sooner or later," said a wise man to me the other day, "always sooner or later in the Home Rule question you bump up against religion." That is, unhappily, still true, though not so true to-day as in 1886 or in 1893. No one who visits Ireland to-day can doubt that the religious hatreds of the past are being softened; but, unhappily, this process, as recent events have vividly shown us, is still fiercely resisted by a small minority.
It may almost be said that in Ireland religious intolerance is a political vested interest. It would indeed be impossible to justify the immense preponderance of salaried power and place still given at the centre to the Protestant minority[47] unless you could maintain the idea that the Catholic is a dangerous man when in a place of power. That consideration, doubtless largely unconscious, may yet partly explain the immense amount of energy devoted in the north-east of Ireland to the encouragement of religious prejudice—honest in many of the rank-and-file, artificial, I fear, in many of the organisers.
BELFAST
Belfast, so like a great modern city in its magnificent outward aspect, is still largely mediæval at heart. Its chief social energies are thrown into that vast and powerful organisation known as the "Orange Society"—still wearing the badges of the seventeenth century, still uttering its war-cries, and still feeding on its passions. This immense religious club has to support in the modern age that theory of religious incompatibility which nearly every other community has long ago abandoned. It has to justify itself in excluding from the municipal honours of Belfast almost every Roman Catholic. It has to justify the majority of 300,000 Belfast Protestants in giving a small and inadequate representation among the rulers of this great wealthy town to the minority of 100,000 Catholics. To maintain this policy of Ulster ascendancy the Orange chiefs watch every document that comes from Rome with a lynx eye, and try to catch a glimpse of the "Scarlet Woman" behind every Latin rescript.
All this may appear to some good politics; but surely it is past tolerance when these manufacturers of intolerance talk of the intolerance of others.
In all these respects Belfast stands almost alone in Ireland. A canon of the Catholic Church—a man of winning manners and charming personality, who lives on quite friendly terms with his Protestant neighbours in the South of Ireland—told me that on the only occasion when he visited Belfast he was spat at in the streets. The story is quite credible to those who have watched the deliberate manipulation of the worst religious passions by the party organisers of Ulster, not always unassisted by their colleagues in London.
One result is that if you ask any question as to the character of a man in the city of Belfast, the answer will always come to you in terms of religion. In the South the reply will be, "He is a Nationalist," or "He is a Unionist." But in Belfast it will be, "He is a Catholic," or "He is a Protestant."
So fierce is this feeling in Belfast that until recently all political and social differences were submerged by it, and every fresh effort towards local progress was broken up by the revival of religious prejudice. Things have been somewhat changed by the wonderful social and political crusade, quite independent of all religious differences, carried on by that remarkable young citizen of Belfast, Mr. Joseph Devlin, who captured the constituency of West Belfast in 1906 and retained it in 1910 largely on a social reform policy. He has for the first time given Ulster a glimpse of something better than religious fanaticism—a social policy based on the unions of religions for the good of all.[48]
This break in the dark clouds must surely spread until a better spirit prevails.