nkhill Road, or the Dublin Fusiliers from
Portadown; consequently the present situation disgusts rather than
terrifies us. If rifle-levers ever click in rebellion against a Home
Rule government, duly established by statute under the authority of the
Crown, it will be astonishing to find that every bullet in Ireland is a
member of an Orange Lodge. If "Ulster" repudiates the arbitrament of
reason, and the verdict of a free ballot, she simply puts herself
outside the law. And she may be quite assured that the law, driven back
on its ultimate sanction of force, will very sharply and very amply
vindicate itself.

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 Minie
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
than our own in one respect: nobody of any common sense thought of
spoiling such exquisite blague by taking it seriously. Its motive was
universally understood in Ireland. The orators of the movement never for
a moment dreamed of levying war