On the flags are various devices: 'Diamond Heroes,' 'True Blues,' 'No Pope.' The participants give themselves over to character dances, shouting out their favourite songs: 'The Boyne Water' and 'Croppies Lie Down.' The chief part is played by the drummers, the giants of each 'lodge,' who with bared arms beat their drums with holy fury, their fists running with blood, until the first drum breaks and many more after it, until in the evening they fall half-dead in an excess of frenzy." Such is the laboratory in which the mind of Orange Ulster is prepared to face the tasks of the twentieth century.

Barbaric music, the ordinary allowance of drum to fife being three to one, ritual dances, King William on his white horse, the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills, a grand parade of dead ideas and irrelevant ghosts called up in wild speeches by clergymen and politicians--such is Orangeism in its full heat of action.

Can we, with this key to its intellectual history, be really astonished that Shankhill Road should move all its life in a red mist of superstition.

The North of Ireland abounds in instances, trivial and tragic, of this obsession.

Here it is the case of the women of a certain town who, in order to prevent their children from playing in a dangerous swamp close by, have taught them that there are "wee Popes" in it.