tchel travelled too fast for co-religionists whose shoulders had not
yet slipped the burden of old superstitions. The elan 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
Crawford founded his Independent Order, a portent if not yet a power. So
much has been done in the country. But it is in the cities, those
workshops of the society of the future, that the change is most marked.
The new movement finds an apt epitome in the political career of Mr
Joseph Devlin. The workers of Belfast had been accustomed to see labour
problems treated by the old type of Unionist member of parliament either
with cowardice or with contempt. _Enfin Malesherbes vint_. At last a
man rose up out of their own class, although a Catholic and a
Nationalist. He spoke with an awakening eloquence, and he made good his
words. In every industrial struggle in that sweated city he interposed
his strong word to demand justice for the wage-earner. This was a new
sort of politics. It bore fruit where Ulster Unionism had been but a
barren fig-tree. The democracy of Belfast accepted their leader. They
gave him a majority of 16 in West Belfast in 1906 and in four years they
had multiplied it by forty. The Boyne was bridged, and everything that
has since happened has but added a new stay or girder to the strength of
the bridge. And not only labour but capital has passed across that
estranging river to firm ground of patriotism and national unity. Lord
Pirrie, the head of the greatest manufacturing enterprise in Belfast, is
an ardent Home Ruler. Business men, ministers of religion, even lawyers,
are thinking out