The day book. [volume], March 26, 1914, NOON EDITION, Image 7

About The day book. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1911-1917

Image provided by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Urbana, IL

                
THE WAR IN ULSTER AS SEUMAS MACMANUS,
THE FAMOUS HUMORIST; SEES IT
BY SEUMAS MACMANUS
(Copyright, 1914, by the Newspaper
Enterprise Association.)
The Ulster Orangeman is defying
England out of the excess of his loy
alty to her is threatening her to as
sert his allegiance and says he will
. lambaste England to prove his love
for her.
Yet we Ulstermen, who know the
Orangeman as a neighbor and fel
lowman, smile at the idea of his going
out with a loaded gun to maim and
kill the British army. And he smiles
with us -.behind his hand.
Before I left my Donegal (Ulster)
home, last fall, to come on my an
nual American lecture tour, the Ul
ster Orangeman and myself had our
daily joke, when we met, about his
bluff being good enough to scare the
Englishman.
Notwithstanding the fright into
which England and the newspapers
are thrown, I can assure you with
first-hand knowledge that the Ulster
Orangeman, in the bulk, has no more
idea of fighting than of flying over
the moon or over the Atlantic for
the fifty-thousand-dollar prize.
There will be rows, ructions and
jshindigs in plenty if the home rule
bill passes but they'll be in Belfast
and a few. of the other larger towns
of Ulster where the side streets afford
good cover for stoning the police.
They'll riot if the bill passes or if it
does not pass if anything happens,
or if nothing happens. It would be a
bad sign if rows did not happen, be
tokening that there was something
seriously the matter with the health
of the usually exuberant Orange
workingman community.
But the country Orangeman, the
farmer's son, is too decent a fellow,
and has too much respect for his Irish
neighbors and. for himself, to treat
himself to the indiscriminate hurling
at all heads of "kidneys" (two-pound
paving stones), iron bolts and such
like confetti, which are always handy
to the Belfast loyalist.
The country Orangeman (and I
know him well) is not only decent,
but hard headed, as is becoming in
one whose ancestors came from the
Land o' Cakes and Whisky.
Because Carson (who is a genuine
demagogue) has so wrought upon
their imaginations, and because the
English government has had the
weakness to try wheedling, and cud
dling, and bribing, I shouldn't be sur
prised, however, if a handful of hotheads-here
and there went out with
guns and fired at everything in sight
and brought down a rheumatic crow;
got cinematographed and jailed and
pardoned, and, as martyrs, died of old
age.
The shortness of the English
memory is a' marvel. They already
seem to have forgotten that the Ul
ster Orangemen threatened war
every time that Ireland was on the
brink of a remedial measure land
act, local government act, or church
disestablishment act. The Ulster
Orangeman, if you would believe the
demagogues, is always "getting his
gun."
When we were wringing from a
tearful England the Gladstonian land
act of '81 an act that should give
the Irishman the right to improve his
land without his rent raised therefor
the venerable and noted William
Johnston of Bally Kilby, the Orange
leader (who with sweet piety, hated
the world, the flesh, the devil and the
Pope), told the trembling British par
liament that if Irish agitators were to
be pandered to in this way he would
call the Orangemen to come forth
and "line the ditches of Ulster, a gun
in their right hand and a, Bible in
their left" and, if my memory serves
me right, I think their lunch in the
other hand and for "their God and
their country" make the mill wheels
turn with blood! And when the act