There is another kind of Orangeism, that which has begun to think, and the Orangeism that has begun to think is already converted.

I said that Protestant "Ulster" had never given to its own democracy a leader, but to say that is to forget John Mitchel.

Master in prose of a passion as intense as Carlyle's and far less cloudy, of an irony not excelled by Swift, Mitchel flung into the tabernacles of his own people during the Great Famine a sentence that meant not peace but a sword.

He taught them, as no one since, that Orangeism was merely a weapon of exploitation.

While the band played "The Boyne Water" and the people cheered it, the landlords were picking the pockets of the ecstatic crowd.
"The Pope, we know, is the 'man of sin,'" wrote Mitchel, "and the 'Antichrist,' and also, if you like, the 'mystery of iniquity,' and all that, but he brings no ejectments in Ireland." Mitchel travelled too fast for co-religionists whose shoulders had not yet slipped the burden of old superstitions.