Page:The Poetical Works of William Motherwell, 1849.djvu/61

 being, what it really was, a particular form of one of those numerous factions into which Irish society is divided. It would not appear to have occurred to him that whatever the merits, real or imaginary, of the Orange confederacy might be, its introduction into Scotland could be attended with no benefits whatever; and that if it was destined ever to achieve advantages of a permanent kind it was only on the soil which had generated and nourished it that this could happen. As an antagonist to Popery and Jacobitism it was certainly not wanted in Presbyterian Scotland: and a little reflection might have satisfied him that the civil and religious rights of the people of this country were not to be upheld through the instrumentality of an Hibernian political fraternity which had outlived the necessity that gave it birth, and which was now respectable only from the historical associations connected with its origin, and the recollection of the services which it had formerly rendered to the cause of constitutional government in Ireland. His adhesion to this body was, therefore, a decided error in judgment, while it was attended with this additional inconvenience that it gave rise to the suspicion that the party whose public representative he was had become favourable to a system of political propagandism, and was not unwilling to patronise, in an underhand way, that which its general creed repudiated. Legitimate and open combination it did not, because it could not, reject; but it professed to hold secret societies in abhorrence; and though the Orange body might not in strictness of speech deserve