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Title: The Crime Against Europe
       A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914

Author: Roger Casement

Release Date: January 18, 2005 [EBook #14728]

Language: English

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    <h3>THE</h3>

    <h1>Crime Against Europe</h1>
    <hr class="short" />

    <h3><i>A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914</i></h3>

    <h4>BY</h4>

    <h3>SIR ROGER CASEMENT</h3>
    <hr class="short" />

    <h4>COPYRIGHTED 1915</h4>
    <hr />

    <h2>INTRODUCTION.</h2>
    <hr class="short" />

    <p>The reader must remember that these articles were written
    before the war began. They are in a sense prophetic and show a
    remarkable understanding of the conditions which brought about
    the present great war in Europe.</p>

    <p>The writer has made European history a life study and his
    training in the English consular service placed him in a
    position to secure the facts upon which he bases his
    arguments.</p>

    <p>Sir Roger Casement was born in Ireland in September, 1864.
    He was made consul to Lorenzo Marques in 1889, being
    transferred to a similar post in the Portuguese Possessions in
    West Africa, which included the consulate to the Gaboon and the
    Congo Free State. He held this post from 1898 to 1905, when he
    was given the consulate of Santos. The following year he was
    appointed consul to Hayti and San Domingo, but did not proceed,
    going instead to Para, where he served until 1909, when he
    became consul-general to Rio de Janeiro. He was created a
    knight in 1911.</p>

    <p>He was one of the organizers of the Irish Volunteers at
    Dublin in November, 1913, being one of their provisional
    committee. At present he is a member of the governing body of
    that organization. He spent the summer of this year in the
    United States. Sir Roger is at present in Berlin, where, after
    a visit paid to the foreign office by him, the German
    Chancellor caused to be issued the statement that "should the
    German forces reach the shores of Ireland they would come not
    as conquerors but as friends."</p>

    <p>Sir Roger is well known for his investigation into the
    Putomayo rubber district atrocities in 1912.</p>

    <p>December, 1914.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page3"
       id="page3"></a>[pg 3]</span>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter I</h3>

    <h2>THE CAUSES OF THE WAR AND THE FOUNDATION OF PEACE</h2>

    <p>Since the war, foreshadowed in these pages, has come and
    finds public opinion in America gravely shocked at a war it
    believes to be solely due to certain phases of European
    militarism, the writer is now persuaded to publish these
    articles, which at least have the merit of having been written
    well before the event, in the hope that they may furnish a more
    useful point of view. For if one thing is certain it is that
    European militarism is no more the cause of this war than of
    any previous war. Europe is not fighting to see who has the
    best army, or to test mere military efficiency, but because
    certain peoples wish certain things and are determined to get
    and keep them by an appeal to force. If the armies and fleets
    were small the war would have broken out just the same, the
    parties and their claims, intentions, and positions being what
    they are. To find the causes of the war we must seek the
    motives of the combatants, and if we would have a lasting peace
    the foundations upon which to build it must be laid bare by
    revealing those foundations on which the peace was broken. To
    find the causes of the war we should turn not to Blue Books or
    White Papers, giving carefully selected statements of those
    responsible for concealing from the public the true issues that
    move nations to attack each other, but should seek the unavowed
    aims of those nations themselves.</p>

    <p>Once the motive is found it is not hard to say who it is
    that broke the peace, whatever the diplomats may put forward in
    lieu of the real reason.</p>

    <p>The war was, in truth, inevitable, and was made inevitable
    years ago. It was not brought about through the faults or
    temper of Sovereigns or their diplomats, not because there were
    great armies in Europe, but because certain Powers, and one
    Power in particular, nourished ambitions and asserted claims
    that involved not only ever increasing armaments but insured
    ever increasing animosities. In these cases peace, if
    permitted, would have dissipated the ambitions and upset
    claims, so it was only a question of time and
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page4"
       id="page4"></a>[pg 4]</span> opportunity when those whose
       aims required war would find occasion to bring it about.</p>

    <p>As Mr. Bernard Shaw put it, in a recent letter to the press:
    "After having done all in our power to render war inevitable it
    is no use now to beg people not to make a disturbance, but to
    come to London to be kindly but firmly spoken to by Sir Edward
    Grey."</p>

    <p>To find the motive powerful enough to have plunged all
    Europe into war in the short space of a few hours, we must seek
    it, not in the pages of a "white paper" covering a period of
    only fifteen days (July 20th to August 4th, 1914), but in the
    long anterior activities that led the great Powers of Europe
    into definite commitments to each other. For the purposes of
    this investigation we can eliminate at once three of the actual
    combatants, as being merely "accessories after the fact,"
    viz.:&mdash;Servia, Belgium and Japan, and confine our study of
    the causes of the conflict to the aims and motives of the five
    principal combatants. For it is clear that in the quarrel
    between Servia and Austria, Hungary is only a side issue of the
    larger question that divides Europe into armed camps. Were
    categoric proof sought of how small a part the quarrel between
    Vienna and Belgrade played in the larger tragedy, it can be
    found in the urgent insistence of the Russian Government itself
    in the very beginning of the diplomatic conversations that
    preceded the outbreak of hostilities.</p>

    <p>As early as the 24th of July, the Russian Government sought
    to prevail upon Great Britain to proclaim its complete
    solidarity with Russia and France, and on the British
    Ambassador in St. Petersburg pointing out that "direct British
    interests in Servia were nil, and a war on behalf of that
    country would never be sanctioned by British public opinion,"
    the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs replied that "we must
    not forget that the <i>general European</i> question was
    involved, the Servian question being but a part of the former,
    and that Great Britain could not afford to efface herself from
    the problem <i>now at issue</i>." (Despatch of Sir G. Buchanan
    to Sir E. Grey, 24th July, 1914).</p>

    <p>Those problems involved far mightier questions than the
    relations of Servia to Austria, the neutrality of Belgium or
    the wish of Japan to keep the peace of the East by seizing
    Kiao-Chau.</p>

    <p>The neutrality never became a war issue until long after war
    had been decided on and had actually broken out; while Japan
    came into the contest solely because Europe had obligingly
    provided one, and because one European power preferred, for its
    own ends, to <span class="pagenum"><a name="page5"
       id="page5"></a>[pg 5]</span> strengthen an Asiatic race to
       seeing a kindred white people it feared grow stronger in the
       sun.</p>

    <p>Coming then to the five great combatants, we can quickly
    reduce them to four. Austria-Hungary and Germany in this war
    are indivisible. While each may have varying aims on many
    points and ambitions that, perhaps, widely diverge both have
    one common bond, self-preservation, that binds them much more
    closely together than mere formal "allies." In this war
    Austria fights of necessity as a Germanic Power, although the
    challenge to her has been on the ground of her Slav obligations
    and activities. Germany is compelled to support Austria by a
    law of necessity that a glance at the map of Europe explains.
    Hence, for the purpose of the argument, we may put the conflict
    as between the Germanic peoples of Central Europe and those who
    have quarreled with them.</p>

    <p>We thus arrive at the question, "why should such strangely
    consorted allies as England, Russia and France be at war with
    the German people?"</p>

    <p>The answer is not to be found in the White Book, or in any
    statement publicly put forward by Great Britain, Russia or
    France.</p>

    <p>But the answer must be found, if we would find the causes of
    the war, and if we would hope to erect any lasting peace on the
    ruins of this world conflict.</p>

    <p>To accept, as an explanation of the war the statement that
    Germany has a highly trained army she has not used for nearly
    half a century and that her people are so obsessed with
    admiration for it that they longed to test it on their
    neighbours, is to accept as an explanation a stultifying
    contradiction. It is of course much easier to put the blame on
    the Kaiser. This line of thought is highly popular: it accords,
    too, with a fine vulgar instinct.</p>

    <p>The German people can be spared the odium of responsibility
    for a war they clearly did nothing to provoke, by representing
    them as the victims of an autocracy, cased in mail and beyond
    their control. We thus arrive at "the real crime against
    Germany," which explains everything but the thing it set out
    to explain. It leaves unexplained the real crime against
    Europe.</p>

    <p>To explain the causes of the war we must find the causes of
    the alliances of England, France and Russia against
    Germany.</p>

    <p>For the cause of the war is that alliance&mdash;that and
    nothing else. The defence of the <i>Entente Cordiale</i> is
    that it is an innocent pact of friendship, designed only to
    meet the threat of the Triple Alliance.
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page6"
       id="page6"></a>[pg 6]</span> But the answer to that is that
       whereas the Triple Alliance was formed thirty years ago, it
       has never declared war on anyone, while the <i>Triple
       Entente</i> before it is eight years old has involved
       Europe, America, Africa, and Asia in a world conflict. We
       must find the motive for England allying herself with France
       and Russia in an admittedly anti-German "understanding" if
       we would understand the causes of the present war and why it
       is that many besides Bernard Shaw hold that "after having
       done all in our power to render war inevitable" it was idle
       for the British Government to assume a death-bed solicitude
       for peace, having already dug its grave and cast aside the
       shovel for the gun. When that motive is apparent we shall
       realise who it was preferred war to peace and how impossible
       it is to hope for any certain peace ensuing from the victory
       of those who ensured an appeal to arms.</p>

    <p>The <i>Entente Cordiale</i>, to begin with, is unnatural.
    There is nothing in common between the parties to it, save
    antagonism to someone else. It is wrongly named. It is founded
    not on predilections but on prejudices&mdash;not on affection
    but on animosity. To put it crudely it is a bond of hate not of
    love. None of the parties to it like or admire each other, or
    have consistent aims, save one.</p>

    <p>That satisfied, they will surely fall out among themselves,
    and the greater the plunder derived from their victory the more
    certain their ensuing quarrel.</p>

    <p>Great Britain, in her dealings with most white people (not
    with all) is a democracy.</p>

    <p>Russia in her dealings with all, is an autocracy.</p>

    <p>Great Britain is democratic in her government of herself and
    in her dealings with the great white communities of Canada,
    Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. She is not democratic
    in her dealings with subject races within the Empire&mdash;the
    Indians, notably, or the Irish. To the Indians her rule is that
    of an absentee autocracy, differing in speech, colour, religion
    and culture from those submitted to it by force; to the Irish
    that of a resident autocracy bent on eliminating the people
    governed from residence in their own country, and replacing
    them with cattle for British consumption.</p>

    <p>In both instances Britain is notably false to her
    professions of devotion to democratic principles. Her affinity
    with Russia is found then, not in the cases where her
    institutions are good, but in those where they are
    bad.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page7"
       id="page7"></a>[pg 7]</span>

    <p>An alliance founded on such grounds of contact can only
    produce evil.</p>

    <p>To such it gave birth in Persia, to such it must give birth
    in the present war.</p>

    <p>In Persia we saw it betray the principles of democratic
    government, destroy an infant constitution and disembowel the
    constitutionalists, whilst it divided their country into
    "spheres of influence" and to-day we see it harvesting with
    hands yet red with the blood of Persian patriots the redder
    fruit of the seed then sown.</p>

    <p>The alliance with France, while more natural than that with
    Russia if we regard Great Britain as a democracy (by
    eliminating India, Egypt, Ireland) had the same guilty end in
    view, and rests less on affinity of aims than on affinity of
    antipathies.</p>

    <p>The <i>Entente Cordiale</i>, the more closely we inspect it,
    we find is based not on a cordial regard of the parties to it
    for each other, but on a cordial disregard all three
    participants share for the party it is aimed against.</p>

    <p>It will be said that Germany must have done something to
    justify the resentment that could bring about so strangely
    assorted a combination against herself. What has been the crime
    of Germany against the powers now assailing her? She has
    doubtless committed many crimes, as have all the great powers,
    but in what respect has she so grievously sinned against Europe
    that the Czar, the Emperor of India, the King of Great Britain
    and Ireland, the Mikado and the President of the French
    Republic&mdash;to say nothing of those minor potentates who
    like Voltaire's minor prophets seem <i>capable de
    tout</i>&mdash;should now be pledged, by irrevocable pact, to
    her destruction as a great power?</p>

    <p>"German militarism," the reply that springs to the lips, is
    no more a threat to civilisation than French or Russian
    militarism. It was born, not of wars of aggression, but of wars
    of defence and unification. Since it was welded by blood and
    iron into the great human organism of the last forty years it
    has not been employed beyond the frontiers of Germany until
    last year.</p>

    <p>Can the same be said of Russian militarism or of French
    militarism or of British navalism?</p>

    <p>We are told the things differ in quality. The answer is what
    about the intent and the uses made. German militarism has kept
    peace and has not emerged beyond its own frontier until
    threatened with universal attack. Russian militarism has waged
    wars abroad, far beyond the confines of Russian territory;
    French militarism, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page8"
       id="page8"></a>[pg 8]</span> since it was overthrown at
       Sedan, has carried fire and sword across all Northern
       Africa, has penetrated from the Atlantic to the Nile, has
       raided Tonquin, Siam, Madagascar, Morocco, while English
       navalism in the last forty years has bombarded the coast
       lines, battered the ports, and landed raiding parties
       throughout Asia and Africa, to say nothing of the well nigh
       continuous campaigns of annexation of the British army in
       India, Burma, South Africa, Egypt, Tibet, or Afghanistan,
       within the same period.</p>

    <p>As to the quality of the materialism of the great
    Continental Powers there is nothing to prefer in the French and
    Russian systems to the German system. Each involved enormous
    sacrifices on the people sustaining it. We are asked, however,
    to believe that French militarism is maintained by a
    "democracy" and German militarism by an "autocracy." Without
    appealing to the captive Queen of Madagascar for an opinion on
    the authenticity of French democracy we may confine the
    question to the elected representatives of the two peoples.</p>

    <p>In both cases the war credits are voted by the legislative
    bodies responsible to French and German opinion. The elected
    representatives of Germany are as much the spokesman of the
    nation as those of France, and the German Reichstag has
    sanctioned every successive levy for the support of German
    armaments. As to Russian militarism, it may be presumed no one
    will go quite so far as to assert that the Russian Duma is more
    truly representative of the Russian people than the Parliament
    of the Federated peoples of Germany at Berlin.</p>

    <p>The machines being then approximately the same machines, we
    must seek the justification for them in the uses to which they
    have been put.</p>

    <p>For what does France, for what does Russia maintain a great
    army? Why does Germany call so many youthful Germans to the
    colours? On what grounds of moral sanction does Great Britain
    maintain a navy, whose cost far exceeds all the burdens of
    German militarism?</p>

    <p>Russia stretches across the entire area of Central Asia and
    comprises much of the greater part of Europe as well. In its
    own territory, it is unassailable, and never has been invaded
    with success. No power can plunder or weaken Russia as long as
    she remains within her own borders. Of all the great powers in
    Europe she is the one that after England has the least need of
    a great army.</p>

    <p>She cannot be assailed with success at home, and she has no
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page9"
       id="page9"></a>[pg 9]</span> need to leave her own
       territories in search of lands to colonize. Her population,
       secure in its own vast numbers and vast resources has, for
       all future needs of expansion the continent of Siberia into
       which to overflow. Russia cannot be threatened within Russia
       and has no need to go outside Russia. A Russian army of
       4,000,000 is not necessary to self-defence. Its inspiration
       can be due only to a policy of expansion at the cost of
       others, and its aim to extend and to maintain existing
       Russian frontiers. As I write it is engaged not in a war of
       defence but in a war of invasion, and is the instrument of a
       policy of avowed aggression.</p>

    <p>Not the protection of the Slavs from Austria, herself so
    largely a Slavic power and one that does not need to learn the
    principles of good government from Russia, but the
    incorporation of the Slavs within the mightiest empire upon
    earth&mdash;this is the main reason why Russia maintains the
    mightiest army upon earth. Its threat to Germany, as the
    protector of Austria-Hungary, has been clear, and if we would
    find the reason for German militarism we shall find at least
    one half of it across the Russian frontier.</p>

    <p>The huge machine of the French army, its first line troops
    almost equal to Germany's, is not a thing of yesterday.</p>

    <p>It was not German aggression founded it&mdash;although
    Germany felt it once at Jena. Founded by kings of France,
    French militarism has flourished under republic, empire,
    constitutional monarchy, and empire again until to-day we find
    its greatest bloom full blown under the mild breath of the
    third republic. What is the purpose of this perfect machine?
    Self-defence? From what attack? Germany has had it in her
    power, again and again within the last thirty years to attack
    France at a disadvantage, if not even with impunity. Why has
    she refrained&mdash;whose hand restrained her? Not
    Russia's&mdash;not England's. During the Russo-Japanese war or
    during the Boer war, France could have been assailed with ease
    and her army broken to pieces. But German militarism refrained
    from striking that blow. The object of the great army France
    maintains is not to be found in reasons of self-defence, but
    may be found, like that of Russia in hopes of armed expansion.
    Since the aim in both cases was the same, to wage a war of
    aggression to be termed of "recovery" in one case and
    "protection" in the other, it was not surprising that Czar and
    President should come together, and that the cause of the Slavs
    should become identified with the cause of Strasburg.</p>

    <p>To "protect" the Slavs meant assailing Austria-Hungary
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page10"
       id="page10"></a>[pg 10]</span> (another way of attacking
       Germany), and to "recover" Strasburg meant a
       <i>mes-alliance</i> between democrat of France and Cossack
       of the Don.</p>

    <p>We come now to the third party to die Entente, and it is now
    we begin to perceive how it was that a cordial understanding
    with England rendered a Russo-French attack upon Germany only a
    question of time and opportunity. Until England appeared upon
    the scene neither Russia nor France, nor both combined, could
    summon up courage to strike the blow. Willing to wound they
    were both afraid to strike. It needed a third courage, a keener
    purpose and a greater immunity.</p>

    <p>German militarism was too formidable a factor in the life of
    65,000,000 of the most capable people in Europe to be lightly
    assailed even by France and Russia combined. Russia needed
    money to perfect the machinery of invasion, so sorely tried by
    the disastrous failure to invade Korea and Manchuria. France
    had the money to advance, but she still doubted the ability of
    her stagnant population of 40,000,000 to face the growing
    magnitude of the great people across the Rhine. It needed
    another guarantee&mdash;and England brought it.</p>

    <p>From the day that Great Britain and her mighty fleet joined
    the separated allies with their mighty armies, the bond between
    them and the circle round Germany grew taut. From that day the
    counsels of the allies and their new found "friend" thickened
    and quickened. The immovable "menace across the Rhine" in one
    case had become the active "menace across the North Sea" in the
    other case.</p>

    <p>The sin of German militarism was at last out. It could take
    to the water as kindly as to the land. As long as the war
    machine guaranteed the inviolability of German territory it was
    no threat to European peace, but when it assumed the task of
    safe-guarding German rights at sea it became the enemy of
    civilization. These trading people not content with an army
    that kept French "revanche" discreetly silent and Slav "unity"
    a dream of the future presumed to have a sea-born commerce that
    grew by leaps and bounds, and they dared to build a navy to
    defend and even to extend it. <i>Delenda est Carthago!</i> From
    that day the doom of "German militarism" was sealed; and
    England, democratic England, lay down with the Czar in the same
    bed to which the French housewife had already transferred her
    republican
    counterpane.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page11"
       id="page11"></a>[pg 11]</span>

    <p>The duration of peace became only a question of time, and
    the war of to-day only a question of opportunity and pretext.
    Each of the parties to the understanding had the same clear
    purpose to serve, and while the aim to each was different the
    end was the same. Germany's power of defence must be destroyed.
    That done each of the sleeping partners to the unsigned compact
    would get the share of the spoils, guarded by armed German
    manhood, he coveted.</p>

    <p>To Russia, the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and the
    incorporation of the Slav elements in part into her own vast
    empire, in part into a vassal and subordinate Balkan
    Confederacy.</p>

    <p>To France the restoration of Lorraine, with Metz, and of
    Alsace with Strasburg and their 1,500,000 of German speaking
    Teutons to the French Empire.</p>

    <p>To England, the destruction of German sea-power and along
    with it the permanent crippling of German competition in the
    markets of the world.</p>

    <p>Incidentally German colonies would disappear along with
    German shipping, and with both gone a German navy would become
    a useless burden for a nation of philosophers to maintain, so
    that the future status of maritime efficiency in Europe could
    be left to the power that polices the seas to equitably fix for
    all mankind, as well as for the defeated rival.</p>

    <p>Such an outline was the altruistic scope of the unsigned
    agreement entered into by the three parties of the <i>Triple
    Entente</i>; and it only remained to get ready for the day when
    the matter could be brought to issue. The murder of the
    Archduke Ferdinand furnished Russia with the occasion, since
    she felt that her armies were ready, the sword sharpened, and
    the Entente sure and binding.</p>

    <p>The mobilization by Russia was all that France needed "to do
    that which might be required of her by her interests." (Reply
    of the French Government to the German Ambassador at Paris,
    August 1st, 1914.)</p>

    <p>Had the neutrality of Belgium been respected as completely
    as the neutrality of Holland, England would have joined her
    "friends" in the assault on Germany, as Sir Edward Grey was
    forced to admit when the German Ambassador in vain pressed him
    to state his own terms as the price of English neutrality.</p>

    <p>The hour had struck. Russia was sure of herself, and the
    rest followed automatically since all had been provided for
    long before. The French fleet was in the Mediterranean, as the
    result of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page12"
       id="page12"></a>[pg 12]</span> military compact between
       France and England signed, sealed and delivered in November,
       1912, and <i>withheld from the cognizance of the British
       Parliament until after war had been declared</i>. The
       British fleet had been mobilized early in July in
       anticipation of Russia's mobilization on land&mdash;and here
       again it is Sir Edward Grey who incidentally supplies the
       proof.</p>

    <p>In his anxiety, while there was still the fear that Russia
    might hold her hand, he telegraphed to the British Ambassador
    in St. Petersburg on 27th of July, requiring him to assure the
    Russian Foreign Minister, that the British Fleet, "which is
    concentrated, <i>as it happens</i>" would not disperse from
    Portland.</p>

    <p>That "as it happens" is quite the most illuminating slip in
    the British White Paper, and is best comprehended by those who
    know what have been the secret orders of the British fleet
    since 1909, and what was the end in view when King George
    reviewed it earlier in the month, and when His Majesty so
    hurriedly summoned the unconstitutional "Home Rule" conference
    at Buckingham Palace on 18th of July. Nothing remained for the
    "friends" but to so manoeuvre that Germany should be driven to
    declare war, or see her frontiers crossed. If she did the
    first, she became the "aggressor"; if she waited to be attacked
    she incurred the peril of destruction.</p>

    <p>Such, in outline, are the causes and steps that led to the
    outbreak of war. The writer has seen those steps well and
    carefully laid, tested and tried beforehand. Every rung of the
    scaling ladder being raised for the storming of the German
    defences on land and sea was planed and polished in the British
    Foreign Office.</p>

    <p>As Sir Edward Grey confessed three years ago, he was "but
    the fly on the wheel." That wheel was the ever faster driven
    purpose of Great Britain to destroy the growing sea-power and
    commerce of Germany. The strain had reached the breaking
    point.</p>

    <p>During the first six months of 1914, German export trade
    almost equalled that of Great Britain. Another year of peace,
    and it would certainly have exceeded it, and for the first time
    in the history of world trade Great Britain would have been put
    in the second place. German exports from January to June had
    swelled to the enormous total of $1,045,000,000 as against the
    $1,075,000,000 of Great Britain. A war against such figures
    could not be maintained in the markets, it must be transferred
    to the seas.</p>

    <p>Day by day as the war proceeds, although it is now only six
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page13"
       id="page13"></a>[pg 13]</span> weeks old, the pretences
       under which it was begun are being discarded. England fights
       not to defend the neutrality of Belgium, not to destroy
       German militarism, but to retain, if need be by involving
       the whole world in war, her supreme and undisputed ownership
       of the seas.</p>

    <p>This is the crime against Europe, the crime against the
    world that, among other victims the United States are invited
    to approve, in order that to-morrow their own growing navy may
    be put into a like posture with that of a defeated Germany.</p>

    <p>With the Kiel Canal "handed to Denmark," as one of the
    fruits of British victory, as Lord Charles Beresford yesterday
    magnanimously suggested, how long may it be before the Panama
    Canal shall be found to be "a threat to peace" in the hands of
    those who constructed it?</p>

    <p>A rival fleet in being, whether the gunners be Teuton or
    Anglo-Saxon unless the Admiralty controlling it is seated at
    Whitehall, will always be an eyesore to the Mistress of the
    seas, in other words, "a threat to the peace of the world."</p>

    <p>The war of armaments cannot be ended by the disarming of the
    German people. To hand Europe over to a triumphal alliance of
    Russian and French militarism, while England controls the
    highways and waterways of mankind by a fleet whose function is
    "to dictate the maritime law of nations," will beget indeed a
    new Europe, but a Europe whose acquiescence is due to fear and
    the continued pressure of well-sustained force&mdash;a Europe
    submitted to the despotism of unnatural alliances designed to
    arrest the laws of progress.</p>

    <p>The laws of progress demand that efficiency shall prevail.
    The crime of Germany has been superior efficiency, not so much
    in the arts of war as in the products of peace. If she go down
    to-day before a combination of brute force and unscrupulous
    intelligence her fall cannot be permanent. Germany has within
    herself the forces that ensure revival, and revival means
    recovery. Neither France nor Russia nor both combined, can give
    to Europe what Britain now designs to take from it by their
    help.</p>

    <p>Whatever may be the result of this war on the field of
    battle, to France indeed it can bring only one end. For her
    there is no future save that of a military empire. Her life
    blood is dried up. This war will sweep away all power of
    recuperation. She will remain impotent to increase her race,
    sterile of new forces for good, her young men's blood gone to
    win the barren fields of Alsace.
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page14"
       id="page14"></a>[pg 14]</span> Her one purpose in the new
       Europe will be to hold a sword, not her own, over the
       struggling form of a resurgent Germany in the interests of
       another people. Let Germany lose 1,000,000 men in the
       fighting of to-day, she can recover them in two years of
       peace. But to France the losses of this war, whether she win
       or lose, cannot be made good in a quarter of a century of
       child births. Whatever comes to Russia, to England, France
       as a great free power is gone. Her future function will be
       to act in a subordinate capacity alone; supported and
       encouraged by England she will be forced to keep up a great
       army in order that the most capable people of the continent,
       with a population no defeat can arrest, shall not fill the
       place in Europe and in the world they are called on surely
       to fill, and one that conflicts only with British aims and
       appetites.</p>

    <p>German expansion was no threat to France. It was directed to
    other fields, chiefly those of commerce. In order to keep it
    from those fields England fanned the dying fires of French
    resentment and strove by every agency to kindle a natural
    sentiment into an active passion.</p>

    <p>The historian of the future will record that whatever the
    immediate fate of Germany may be, the permanent victim was
    France.</p>

    <p>The day England won her to an active policy of vengeance
    against the victor of 1870, she wooed her to abiding loss. Her
    true place in Europe was one of friendship with Germany. But
    that meant, inevitably, the discovery by Europe that the chief
    barrier to European concord lay not in the armies of the
    powers, but in the ring of hostile battleships that constrained
    her peoples into armed camps.</p>

    <p>European militarism rests on English navalism. English
    navalism requires for its continued existence a disunited
    Europe; and a Europe kept apart is a Europe armed, anxious and
    watchful, bent on mutual attack, its eyes fixed on the
    <i>earth</i>. Europe must lift its eyes to the sea. There lies
    the highway of the nations, the only road to freedom&mdash;the
    sole path to peace.</p>

    <p>For the pent millions of Europe there can be no peace, no
    laying aside of arms, no sincere development of trade or
    culture while one people, <i>in Europe but not of Europe</i>,
    immune themselves from all attack, and sure that whatever
    suffering they inflict on others can never be visited on their
    own shores, have it in their power to foment strife with
    impunity and to call up war from the ends of the earth while
    they themselves enjoy the blessing of
    peace.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page15"
       id="page15"></a>[pg 15]</span>

    <p>England, the soul and brain of this confederacy of war
    abroad remains at peace at home. As I write these words a
    despatch from Sir Alfred Sharpe, the correspondent of a London
    paper in France, comes to hand. It should be placarded in every
    Foreign Office of the world, in every temple of justice, in
    every house of prayer.</p>

    <p>"It is difficult for the people in England to realize the
    condition of Northern France at the present time. Although the
    papers are full of accounts of desolation and destruction
    caused by the German invasion, it is only by an actual
    experience that a full realization of the horror comes. To
    return to England after visiting the French war zone is to come
    back to a land of perfect peace, where everything is normal and
    where it is not easy to believe we are almost within hearing
    distance of the cannonade on the Aisne."</p>

    <p>(Sir Alfred Sharpe, to the <i>Daily Chronicle</i> from the
    Front, September 2nd, 1914.)</p>

    <p>It is this immunity from the horror of war that makes all
    Englishmen jingoes. They are never troubled by the consequences
    of belligerency. Since it is only by "an actual experience that
    the full realization of the horror comes." Until that horror
    strikes deep on English soil her statesmen, her Ministers, her
    Members of Parliament, her editors, will never sincerely love
    peace, but will plan always to ensure war abroad, whenever
    British need or ambition demands it.</p>

    <p>Were England herself so placed that responsibility for her
    acts could be enforced on her own soil, among her own people,
    and on the head of those who devise her policies, then we might
    talk of arbitration treaties with hope, and sign compacts of
    goodwill sure that they were indeed cordial understandings.</p>

    <p>But as long as Great Britain retains undisputed ownership of
    the chief factor that ensures at will peace or war on others,
    there can be only armaments in Europe, ill-will among men and
    war fever in the blood of mankind.</p>

    <p>British democracy loves freedom of the sea in precisely the
    same spirit as imperial Rome viewed the spectacle of Celtic
    freedom beyond the outposts of the Roman legions; as Agricola
    phrased it, something "to wear down and take possession of so
    that freedom may be put out of sight."</p>

    <p>The names change but the spirit of imperial exploitation,
    whether it call itself an empire or a democracy, does not
    change.</p>

    <p>Just as the Athenian Empire, in the name of a democracy,
    sought to impose servitude at sea on the Greek world, so the
    British <span class="pagenum"><a name="page16"
       id="page16"></a>[pg 16]</span> Empire, in the name of a
       democracy, seeks to encompass mankind within the long walls
       of London.</p>

    <p>The modern Sparta may be vanquished by the imperial
    democrats assailing her from East and West. But let the world
    be under no illusions.</p>

    <p>If Germany go down to-day, vanquished by a combination of
    Asiatic, African, American, Canadian and European enemies, the
    gain will not be to the world nor to the cause of peace.</p>

    <p>The mistress of the seas will remain to ensure new
    combinations of enmity to prohibit the one league of concord
    that alone can bring freedom and peace to the world. The cause
    that begot this war will remain to beget new wars.</p>

    <p>The next victim of universal sea-power may not be on the
    ravaged fields of mid-Europe, but mid the wasted coasts and
    bombarded seaports of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.</p>

    <p>A permanent peace can only be laid on a sure foundation. A
    sure foundation of peace among men can only be found when
    mastery of the sea by one people has been merged in freedom of
    the seas for all.</p>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter II</h3>

    <h2>THE KEEPER OF THE SEAS</h2>

    <p>As long ago as 1870 an Irishman pointed out that if the
    English press did not abandon the campaign of prejudiced
    suspicion it was even then conducting against Germany, the time
    for an understanding between Great Britain and the German
    people would be gone for ever.</p>

    <p>It was Charles Lever who delivered this shrewd appreciation
    of the onlooker.</p>

    <p>Writing from Trieste on August 29th, 1870, to John
    Blackwood, he stated:</p>

    <p>"Be assured the <i>Standard</i> is making a great blunder by
    its anti-Germanism and English opinion has <i>just now</i> a
    value in Germany <span class="pagenum"><a name="page17"
       id="page17"></a>[pg 17]</span> which if the nation be once
       disgusted with us will be gone for ever."</p>

    <p>Lever preserved enough of the Irishman through all his
    official connection to see the two sides of a question and
    appreciate the point of view of the other man.</p>

    <p>What Lever pointed out during the early stages of the
    Franco-German war has come to pass. The <i>Standard</i> of
    forty years ago is the British press of to-day, with here and
    there the weak voice of an impotent Liberalism crying in the
    wilderness. Germany has, indeed, become thoroughly disgusted
    and the hour of reconciliation has long since gone by. In
    Lever's time it was now or never; the chance not taken then
    would be lost for ever, and the English publicist of to-day is
    not in doubt that it is now too late. His heart-searchings need
    another formula of expression&mdash;no longer a conditional
    assertion of doubt, but a positive questioning of impending
    fact, "is it too soon." That the growing German navy must be
    smashed he is convinced, but how or when to do it he is not so
    clear.</p>

    <p>The situation is not yet quite intolerable, and so, although
    many urge an immediate attack before the enemy grows too
    strong, the old-time British love of compromise and trust in
    luck still holds his hand. The American "alliance" too, may yet
    come off. The Entente with France, already of great value, can
    be developed into something more assuredly anti-German, and if
    present-day relations of friendship with the United States can
    be but tightened into a mutual committal of both Powers to a
    common foreign policy, then the raid on Germany may never be
    needed. She can be bottled up without it. No man who studies
    the British mind can have any doubt of the fixed trend of
    British thought.</p>

    <p>It can be summed up in one phrase. German expansion is not
    to be tolerated. It can only be a threat to or attained at the
    expense of British interests. Those interests being world-wide,
    with the seas for their raiment nay, with the earth for their
    footstool&mdash;it follows that wherever Germany may turn for
    an outlet she is met by the British challenge: "Not there!"
    British interests interdict the Old World; the Monroe Doctrine,
    maintained, it is alleged by British naval supremacy, forbids
    the New.</p>

    <p>Let Germany acquire a coaling station, a sanitorium, a
    health resort, the ground for a hotel even, on some foreign
    shore, and "British interests" spring to attention, English
    jealousy is aroused. How long this state of tension can last
    without snapping could, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page18"
       id="page18"></a>[pg 18]</span> perhaps, be best answered in
       the German naval yards. It is evident that some 7,000,000 of
       the best educated race in the world, physically strong,
       mentally stronger, homogeneous, highly trained, highly
       skilled, capable and energetic and obedient to a discipline
       that rests upon and is moulded by a lofty conception of
       patriotism, cannot permanently be confined to a strictly
       limited area by a less numerous race, less well educated,
       less strong mentally and physically and assuredly less well
       trained, skilled and disciplined. Stated thus the problem
       admits of a simple answer; and were there no other factor
       governing the situation, that answer would have been long
       since given.</p>

    <p>It is not the ethical superiority of the English race that
    accounts for their lead, but the favourable geographical
    situation from which they have been able to develop and direct
    their policy of expansion.</p>

    <p>England has triumphed mainly from her position. The
    qualities of her people have, undoubtedly, counted for much,
    but her unrivalled position in the lap of the Atlantic, barring
    the seaways and closing the tideways of Central and
    North-eastern Europe, has counted for more.</p>

    <p>With this key she has opened the world to herself and closed
    it to her rivals.</p>

    <p>The long wars with France ended in the enhancement of this
    position by the destruction of the only rival fleet in
    being.</p>

    <p>Europe, without navies, without shipping became for England
    a mere westward projection of Asia, dominated by warlike
    peoples who could always be set by the ears and made to fight
    upon points of dynastic honour, while England appropriated the
    markets of mankind. Thenceforth, for the best part of a
    century, while Europe was spent in what, to the superior
    Britain were tribal conflicts, the seas and coasts of the world
    lay open to the intrusions of his commerce, his colonists, his
    finance, until there was seemingly nothing left outside the two
    Americas worth laying hands on. This highly favoured maritime
    position depends, however, upon an unnamed factor, the
    unchallenged possession and use of which by England has been
    the true foundation of her imperial greatness. Without Ireland
    there would be to-day no British Empire. The vital importance
    of Ireland to England is understood, but never proclaimed by
    every British statesman. To subdue that western and
    ocean-closing island and to exploit its resources, its people
    and, above all its position, to the sole advantage of the
    eastern island, has been the set aim of every English
    Government from the days <span class="pagenum"><a name="page19"
       id="page19"></a>[pg 19]</span> of Henry VIII onwards. The
       vital importance of Ireland to Europe is not and has not
       been understood by any European statesman. To them it has
       not been a European island, a vital and necessary element of
       European development, but an appanage of England, an island
       beyond an island, a mere geographical expression in the
       titles of the conqueror. Louis XIV, came nearest, perhaps,
       of European rulers to realizing its importance in the
       conflict of European interests when he sought to establish
       James II on its throne as rival to the monarch of Great
       Britain and counterpoise to the British sovereignty in the
       western seas. Montesquieu alone of French writers grasped
       the importance of Ireland in the international affairs of
       his time, and he blames the vacillation of Louis, who failed
       to put forth his strength, to establish James upon the
       throne of Ireland and thus by a successful act of perpetual
       separation to <i>affaiblir le voisin</i>. Napoleon, too
       late, in St. Helena, realized his error: "Had I gone to
       Ireland instead of to Egypt the Empire of England was at an
       end."</p>

    <p>With these two utterances of the French writer and of the
    French ruler we begin and end the reference of Ireland to
    European affairs which continental statecraft has up to now
    emitted, and so far has failed to apply.</p>

    <p>To-day there is probably no European thinker (although
    Germany produced one in recent times), who, when he faces the
    over-powering supremacy of Great Britain's influence in world
    affairs and the relative subordination of European rights to
    the asserted interests of that small island, gives a thought to
    the other and smaller island beyond its shores. And yet the key
    to British supremacy lies there. Perhaps the one latter day
    European who perceived the true relation of Ireland to Great
    Britain was Neibuhr.</p>

    <p>"Should England," he said, "not change her conduct, Ireland
    may still for a long period belong to her, but not always; and
    the loss of that country is the death day, not only to her
    greatness, but of her very existence."</p>

    <p>I propose to point out as briefly as may be possible in
    dealing with so unexpected a proposition, that the restoration
    of Ireland to European life lies at the bottom of all
    successful European effort to break the bonds that now shackle
    every continental people that would assert itself and extend
    its ideals, as opposed to British interests, outside the limits
    of Europe.</p>

    <p>It may be well first to define "British interests" and to
    show that these are not necessarily synonymous with European
    interests. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page20"
       id="page20"></a>[pg 20]</span> British interests are: first,
       the control of all the seas of all the world&mdash;in full
       military and commercial control. If this be not challenged
       peace is permitted: to dispute it seriously means war.</p>

    <p>Next in order of British interests stands the right of
    pre-emption to all healthy, fertile, "unoccupied" lands of the
    globe not already in possession of a people capable of
    seriously disputing invasion, with the right of reversion to
    such other regions as may, from time to time prove commercially
    desirable or financially exploitable, whether suitable for
    British colonization or not.</p>

    <p>In a word, British interests assume that the future of the
    world shall be an English-speaking future. It is clear that
    sooner or later the British colonies, so called, must develop
    into separate nationalities, and that the link of a common
    crown cannot bind them forever. But, as Sir Wilfred Laurier
    said at the recent Imperial Conference: "We bring you British
    institutions"&mdash;English language, English law, English
    trade, English supremacy, in a word&mdash;this is the ideal
    reserved for mankind and summed up in words "British
    interests."</p>

    <p>Turn where you will these interests are in effective
    occupation, and whether it be Madeira, Teneriffe, Agadir,
    Tahiti, Bagdad, the unseen flag is more potent to exclude the
    non-British intruder than the visible standard of the occupying
    tenant. England is the landlord of civilization, mankind her
    tenantry, and the earth her estate. If this be not a highly
    exaggerated definition of British interests, and in truth it is
    but a strongly coloured chart of the broad outline of the
    design, then it is clear that Europe has a very serious problem
    to face if European civilization and ideals, as differing from
    the British type, are to find a place for their ultimate
    expansion in any region favoured by the sun.</p>

    <p>The actual conflict of European interests in Morocco is a
    fair illustration of English methods.<a id="footnotetag1"
       name="footnotetag1"></a><a href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a></p>

    <p>In the past France was the great antagonist, but since she
    is to-day no longer able to seriously dispute the British
    usufruct of the overseas world she is used (and rewarded) in
    the struggle now maintained to exclude Germany at all costs
    from the arena. Were France still dangerous she would never
    have been allowed to go to Algeciras, or from Algeciras to Fez.
    She has uses, however, in the anti-German prize ring and so
    Morocco is the price of her hire. That Germany should presume
    to inspect the transaction or claim a share in the settlement
    has filled the British mind with profound
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page21"
       id="page21"></a>[pg 21]</span> indignation, the echoes of
       which are heard rumbling round the world from the Guildhall
       to Gaboon and from the Congo to Tahiti. The mere press
       rumour that France might barter Tahiti for German goods
       filled the British newspaper world with supermundane wrath.
       That France should presume to offer or Germany should accept
       a French Pacific island in part discharge of liabilities
       contracted at Algeciras was a threat to British interests.
       Tahiti in the hands of a decadent republic, the greatest if
       you will, but still one of the dying nations, is a thing to
       be borne with, but Tahiti possibly in the hands of Germany
       becomes at once a challenge and a threat.</p>

    <p>And so we learn that "Australasia protests" to the Home
    Government at the mere rumour that France may choose to part
    with one of her possessions to win German goodwill in Morocco.
    Neither France nor Germany can be permitted to be a free agent
    in a transaction that however regarded as essential to their
    own interests might affect, even by a shadow on the sea, the
    world orbit of British interests. These interests it will be
    noted have reached such a stage of development as to require
    that all foreign States that cannot be used as tools, or
    regarded as agencies, must be treated as enemies. Germany with
    her growing population, her advancing industries, her keen
    commercial ability, and her ever expanding navy has become the
    enemy of civilization. Far too strong to be openly assailed on
    land she must at all costs be pent up in Central Europe and by
    a ring-fence of armed understandings prohibited from a wider
    growth that would certainly introduce a rival factor to those
    British institutions and that world language that are seriously
    if not piously meditated as the ordained future for
    mankind.</p>

    <p>For English mentality is such that whatever England does is
    divinely ordained, and whether she stamps out a nation or
    merely sinks a ship the hymn of action is "Nearer My God, to
    Thee." In a recent deputation to King George V it will be
    remembered that certain British religious bodies congratulated
    that monarch on the third centenary of the translation into
    English of the Bible.</p>

    <p>Both the addresses of the subjects, eminent, religious and
    cultured men, and the sovereign's reply were highly informative
    of the mental attitude of this extraordinary people. The Bible,
    it appeared, was the "greatest possession of the English race."
    "The British Bible" was the first and greatest of British
    investments and upon the moral dividends derived from its
    possession was founded the imperial greatness of this Island
    Empire. That other peoples possessed the Bible and had even
    translated it before England was
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page22"
       id="page22"></a>[pg 22]</span> not so much as hinted at.
       That the Bible was Greek and Hebrew in origin was never
       whispered. It began and ended with the English Authorised
       Version. The British Bible was the Bible that counted. It
       was the Bible upon which the sun never sets, the Bible that
       had blown Indian mutineers from its muzzle in the 'fifties
       and was prepared to-day to have a shot at any other
       mutineers, Teuton or Turk, who dared to dispute its claim
       that the meek shall inherit the earth. The unctuous
       rectitude that converts the word of God into wadding for a
       gun is certainly a formidable opponent, as Cromwell proved.
       To challenge English supremacy becomes not merely a threat
       to peace, it is an act of sacrilege. And yet this world-wide
       empire broad based upon the British Bible and the English
       navy, and maintained by a very inflexible interpretation of
       the one and a very skilful handling of the other, rests upon
       a sunk foundation that is older than both and will surely
       bring both to final shipwreck.</p>

    <p>The British Empire is founded not upon the British Bible or
    the British dreadnought but upon Ireland. The empire that began
    upon an island, ravaged, sacked and plundered shall end on an
    island, "which whether it proceed from the very genius of the
    soil, or the influence of the stars, or that Almighty God hath
    not yet appointed the time of her reformation, or that He
    reserveth her in this unquiet state still for some secret
    scourge which shall by her come unto England, it is hard to be
    known but yet much to be feared." Thus Edmund Spenser 340 years
    ago, whose muse drew profit from an Irish estate (one of the
    first fruits of empire) and who being a poet had imagination to
    perceive that a day of payment must some day be called and that
    the first robbed might be the first to repay. The Empire
    founded on Ireland by Henry and Elizabeth Tudor has expanded
    into mighty things. England deprived of Ireland resumes her
    natural proportions, those of a powerful kingdom. Still
    possessing Ireland she is always an empire. For just as Great
    Britain bars the gateways of northern and west central Europe,
    to hold up at will the trade and block the ports of every coast
    from the Baltic to the Bay of Biscay, so Ireland stands between
    Britain and the greater seas of the west and blocks for her the
    highways of the ocean. An Ireland strong, independent and
    self-contained, a member of the European family of nations,
    restored to her kindred, would be the surest guarantee for the
    healthy development of European interests in those regions
    whence they are to-day excluded by the anti-European policy of
    England.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page23"
       id="page23"></a>[pg 23]</span>

    <p>The relation of Ireland to Great Britain has been in no wise
    understood on the continent. The policy of England has been for
    centuries to conceal the true source of her supplies and to
    prevent an audit of transactions with the remoter island. As
    long ago as the reign of Elizabeth Tudor this shutting off of
    Ireland from contact with Europe was a settled point of English
    policy. The three "German Earls" with letters from the Queen
    who visited Dublin in 1572 were prevented by the Lord Deputy
    from seeing for themselves anything beyond the walls of the
    city.<a id="footnotetag2"
       name="footnotetag2"></a><a href="#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a></p>

    <p>To represent the island as a poverty striken land inhabited
    by a turbulent and ignorant race whom she has with unrewarded
    solicitude sought to civilise, uplift and educate has been a
    staple of England's diplomatic trade since modern diplomacy
    began. To compel the trade of Ireland to be with herself alone;
    to cut off all direct communication between Europe and this
    second of European islands until no channel remained save
    through Britain; to enforce the most abject political and
    economic servitude one people ever imposed upon another; to
    exploit all Irish resources, lands, ports, people, wealth, even
    her religion, everything in fine that Ireland held, to the sole
    profit and advancement of England, and to keep all the books
    and rigorously refuse an audit of the transaction has been the
    secret but determined policy of England.</p>

    <p>We have read lately something of Mexican peonage, of how a
    people can be reduced to a lawless slavery, their land
    expropriated, their bodies enslaved, their labour appropriated,
    and how the nexus of this fraudulent connection lies in a
    falsified account. The hacenade holds the peon by a debt
    bondage. His palace in Mexico City, or on the sisal plains of
    Yucatan is reared on the stolen labour of a people whose
    bondage is based on a lie. The hacenade keeps the books and
    debits the slave with the cost of the lash that scourges him
    into the fields. Ireland is the English peon, the great peon of
    the British Empire. The books and the palaces are in London but
    the work and the wealth have come from peons on the Irish
    Estate. The armies that overthrew Napoleon; the fleets that
    swept the navies of France and Spain from the seas were
    recruited from this slave pen of English civilisation. During
    the last 100 years <span class="pagenum"><a name="page24"
       id="page24"></a>[pg 24]</span> probably 2,000,000 Irishmen
       have been drafted into the English fleets and armies from a
       land purposely drained of its food. Fully the same number,
       driven by executive-controlled famines have given cheap
       labour to England and have built up her great industries,
       manned her shipping, dug her mines, and built her ports and
       railways while Irish harbours silted up and Irish factories
       closed down. While England grew fat on the crops and beef of
       Ireland, Ireland starved in her own green fields and
       Irishmen grew lean in the strife of Europe.</p>

    <p>While a million Irishmen died of hunger on the most fertile
    plains of Europe, English Imperialism drew over one thousand
    million pounds sterling for investment in a world policy from
    an island that was represented to that world as too poor to
    even bury its dead. The profit to England from Irish peonage
    cannot be assessed in terms of trade, or finance, or taxation.
    It far transcends Lord MacDonnell's recent estimate at Belfast
    of £320,000,000&mdash;"an Empire's ransom," as he bluntly put
    it.</p>

    <p>Not an Empire's ransom but the sum of an Empire's
    achievement, the cost of an Empire's founding, and to-day the
    chief bond of an Empire's existence. Detach Ireland from the
    map of the British Empire and restore it to the map of Europe
    and that day England resumes her native proportions and Europe
    assumes its rightful stature in the empire of the world.
    Ireland can only be restored to the current of European life,
    from which she has so long been purposely withheld by the act
    of Europe. What Napoleon perceived too late may yet be the
    purpose and achievement of a congress of nations. Ireland, I
    submit, is necessary to Europe, is essential to Europe, to-day
    she is retained against Europe, by a combination of elements
    hostile to Europe and opposed to European influence in the
    world. Her strategic importance is a factor of supreme weight
    to Europe and is to-day used in the scales against Europe.
    Ireland is appropriated and used, not to the service of
    European interests but to the extension of anti-European
    interests. The <i>arbitium mundi</i> claimed and most certainly
    exercised by England is maintained by the British fleet, and
    until that power is effectively challenged and held in check it
    is idle to talk of European influence outside of certain narrow
    continental limits.</p>

    <p>The power of the British fleet can never be permanently
    restrained until Ireland is restored to Europe. Germany has of
    necessity become the champion of European interests as opposed
    to the world domination of England and English-speaking
    elements. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page25"
       id="page25"></a>[pg 25]</span> She is to-day a dam, a great
       reservoir rapidly filling with human life that must some day
       find an outlet. England instead of wisely digging channels
       for the overflow has hardened her heart, like Pharaoh, and
       thinks to prevent it or to so divert the stream that it
       shall be lost and drunk up in the thirsty sands of an ever
       expanding Anglo-Saxondom. German laws, German language,
       German civilization are to find no ground for replenishing,
       no soil to fertilize and make rich.</p>

    <p>I believe this to be not only the set policy of England, but
    to be based on the temperamental foundations of the English
    character itself, from which that people could not, even if
    they would, depart. The lists are set. The English mind, the
    English consciousness are such, that to oppose German influence
    in the world is to this people a necessity. They oppose by
    instinct, against argument, in the face of reason, they will do
    it blindly come what may and at all costs, and they will do it
    to the end.</p>

    <p>Their reasoning, if reason exists in what is after all a
    matter of primal instinct, might find expression somewhat as
    follows:</p>

    <p>"German influence cannot but be hostile to British
    interests. The two peoples are too much alike. The qualities
    that have made England great they possess in a still greater
    degree. Given a fair field and no favour they are bound to beat
    us. They will beat us out of every market in the world, and we
    shall be reduced ultimately to a position like that of France
    to-day. Better fight while we are still die stronger. Better
    hinder now ere it be too late. We have bottled up before and
    destroyed our adversaries by delay, by money, by alliances. To
    tolerate a German rivalry is to found a German empire and to
    destroy our own."</p>

    <p>Some such obscure argument as this controls the Englishman's
    reasoning when he faces the growing magnitude of the Teutonic
    people. A bitter resentment, with fear at the bottom, a hurried
    clanging of bolt and rivet in the belt of a new warship and a
    muffled but most diligent hammering at the rivets of an ever
    building American Alliance&mdash;the real Dreadnought this,
    whose keel was laid sixteen years ago and whose slow, secret
    construction has cost the silent swallowing of many a cherished
    British boast.</p>

    <p>English Liberalism might desire a different sort of
    reckoning with Germany, but English Liberalism is itself a
    product of the English temperament, and however it may sigh, by
    individuals, for a better understanding between the two
    peoples, in the mass, it is a part of the national purpose and
    a phase of the national mind
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page26"
       id="page26"></a>[pg 26]</span> and is driven relentlessly to
       the rivets and the hammering, the "Dreadnoughts" in being
       and that mightier Dreadnought yet to be, the Anglo-Saxon
       Alliance which Germany must fight if she is to get out.</p>

    <p>Doubtless she has already a naval policy and the plans for a
    naval war, for the fight will be settled on the sea, but the
    fate will be determined on an island.</p>

    <p>The Empire that has grown from an island and spread with the
    winds and the waves to the uttermost shores will fight and be
    fought for on the water and will be ended where it began, on an
    island.</p>

    <p>That island, I believe, will be Ireland and not Great
    Britain.</p>

    <blockquote class="footnote">
        <a id="footnote1"
                    name="footnote1"></a><b>Footnote 1:</b>
                    <a href="#footnotetag1">(return)</a>

        <p>This was written in August, 1911.</p>
    </blockquote>

    <blockquote class="footnote">
        <a id="footnote2"
                    name="footnote2"></a><b>Footnote 2:</b>
                    <a href="#footnotetag2">(return)</a>

        <p>This time-honoured British precept&mdash;that foreigners
        should not see for themselves the workings of English rule
        in Ireland&mdash;finds frequent expression in the Irish
        State Papers. In a letter from Dublin Castle of August,
        1572, from the Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam to Burghley
        Elizabeth's chief Minister, we are told that the "three
        German Earls" with "their conductor," Mr. Rogers, have
        arrived. The Viceroy adds, as his successors have done up
        to the present day: "According to Your Lordship's direction
        they shall travell as little way into the cuntry as I
        can."</p>
    </blockquote>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter III</h3>

    <h2>THE BALANCE OF POWER</h2>

    <p>A conflict between England and Germany exists already, a
    conflict of aims.</p>

    <p>England rich, prosperous, with all that she can possibly
    assimilate already in her hands, desires peace on present
    conditions of world power. These conditions are not merely that
    her actual possessions should remain intact, but that no other
    Great Power shall, by acquiring colonies and spreading its
    people and institutions into neighbouring regions, thereby
    possibly affect the fuller development of those pre-existing
    British States. For, with England equality is an offence and
    the Power that arrives at a degree of success approximating to
    her own and one capable of being expanded into conditions of
    fair rivalry, has already committed the unpardonable sin. As
    Curran put it in his defence of Hamilton Rowan in 1797,
    "England is marked by a natural avarice of freedom which she is
    studious to engross and accumulate, but most unwilling to
    impart; whether from any necessity of her policy or from her
    weakness, or from her pride, I will not presume to say."</p>

    <p>Thus while England might even be the attacking party, and in
    all probability will be the attacking party, she will embark on
    a war with Germany at an initial disadvantage. She will be on
    her defence. Although, probably, the military aggressor from
    reasons <span class="pagenum"><a name="page27"
       id="page27"></a>[pg 27]</span> of strategy, she will be
       acting in obedience to an economic policy of defence and not
       of attack. Her chief concern will be not to advance and
       seize, always in war the more inspiring task, but to retain
       and hold. At best she could come out of the war with no new
       gain, with nothing added worth having to what she held on
       entering it. Victory would mean for her only that she had
       secured a further spell of quiet in which to consolidate her
       strength and enjoy the good things already won.</p>

    <p>Germany will fight with far other purpose and one that must
    inspire a far more vigorous effort; she will fight, not merely
    to keep what she already has, but to escape from an intolerable
    position of inferiority she knows to be unmerited and forced
    not by the moral or intellectual superiority of her adversary
    or due to her own short comings, but maintained by reason of
    that adversary's geographical position and early seizure of the
    various points of advantage.</p>

    <p>Her effort will be not merely military, it will be an
    intellectual assertion, a fight in very truth for that larger
    freedom, that citizenship of the world England is studious to
    "engross and accumulate" for herself alone and to deny to all
    others. Thus, while English attack at the best will be actuated
    by no loftier feeling than that of a man who, dwelling in a
    very comfortable house with an agreeable prospect resists an
    encroachment on his outlook from the building operations of his
    less well lodged neighbour, Germany will be fighting not only
    to get out of doors into the open air and sunshine, but to
    build a loftier and larger dwelling, fit tenement for a
    numerous and growing offspring.</p>

    <p>Whatever the structure Germany seeks to erect England
    objects to the plan and hangs out her war sign "Ancient
    Lights."</p>

    <p>Who can doubt that the greater patriotism and stronger
    purpose must inspire the man who fights for light, air, and
    freedom, the right to walk abroad, to learn, to teach, aye, and
    to inspire others, rather than him whose chief concern it is to
    see that no one but himself enjoys these opportunities. The
    means, moreover, that each combatant will bring to the conflict
    are, in the end, on the side of Germany. Much the same
    disproportion of resources exists as lay between Rome and
    Carthage.</p>

    <p>England relies on money. Germany on men. And just as Roman
    men beat Carthaginian mercenaries, so must German manhood, in
    the end, triumph over British finance. Just as Carthage in the
    hours of final shock, placing her gold where Romans put their
    gods, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page28"
       id="page28"></a>[pg 28]</span> never with a soul above her
       ships, fell before the people of United Italy, so shall the
       mightier Carthage of the North Seas, in spite of trade,
       shipping, colonies, the power of the purse and the hired
       valour of the foreign (Irish, Indian, African), go down
       before the men of United Germany.</p>

    <p>But if the military triumph of Germany seems thus likely,
    the ultimate assurance, nay even the ultimate safety of German
    civilization can only be secured by a statemanship which shall
    not repeat the mistake of Louis XIV and Napoleon. The military
    defeat of England by Germany is a wholly possible achievement
    of arms, <i>if the conflict be between these two alone</i>, but
    to realize the economic and political fruits of that victory,
    Ireland must be detached from the British Empire. To leave a
    defeated England still in the full possession of Ireland would
    be, not to settle the question of German rights at sea or in
    world affairs, but merely to postpone the settlement to a
    second and possibly far greater encounter. It would be somewhat
    as if Rome, after the first Punic war had left Sicily to
    Carthage. But Ireland is far more vital to England than Sicily
    was to Carthage, and is of far more account to the future of
    Europe on the ocean than the possession of Sicily was to the
    future of the Mediterranean.</p>

    <p>If Germany is to permanently profit from a victory over
    England, she must free the narrow seas, not only by the defeat
    of British fleets in being, but by ensuring that those seas
    shall not again be closed by British fleets yet to be. The
    German gateway to a free Atlantic can only be kept open through
    a free Ireland. For just as the English Channel under the
    existing arrangement, whereby Ireland lies hidden from the rest
    of Europe, can be closed at will by England, so with Ireland no
    longer tied to the girdle of England, that channel cannot be
    locked. The key to the freedom of European navigation lies at
    Berehaven and not at Dover. With Berehaven won from English
    hands, England might close the Channel in truth, but Ireland
    could shut the Atlantic. As Richard Dox put it in 1689,
    quaintly but truly, in his dedication to King William III, and
    Queen Mary of his "History of Ireland from the Earliest
    Times."</p>

    <p>"But no cost can be too great where the prize is of such
    value, and whoever considers the situation, ports, plenty and
    other advantages of Ireland will confess that it must be
    retained at what rate soever; because if it should come into an
    enemy's hands, England would find it impossible to
    <i>flourish</i> and perhaps difficult
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page29"
       id="page29"></a>[pg 29]</span> to <i>subsist</i> without it.
       To demonstrate this assertion it is enough to say that
       Ireland lies in the Line of Trade and that all the English
       vessels that sail to the East, West, and South must, as it
       were, run the gauntlet between the harbours of Brest and
       Baltimore; and I might add that the Irish Wool being
       transported would soon ruin the English Clothing
       Manufacture. Hence it is that all Your Majesty's
       Predecessors have kept close to this fundamental maxim of
       retaining Ireland inseparably united to the Crown of
       England."</p>

    <p>The sole and exclusive appropriation of Ireland and of all
    her resources has indeed formed, since the Recorder of Kinsale
    wrote, the mainstay and chief support of British greatness.</p>

    <p>The natural position of Ireland lying "in the line of
    trade," was possibly its chief value, but that "Irish Wool"
    which was by no means to be allowed free access to world
    markets typifies much else that Ireland has been relentlessly
    forced to contribute to her neighbour's growth and sole
    profit.</p>

    <p>I read but yesterday "Few people realise that the trade of
    Ireland with Great Britain is equal to that of our trade with
    India, is 13,000,000 pounds greater than our trade with
    Germany, and 40,000,000 pounds greater than the whole of our
    trade with the United States." How completely England has laid
    hands on all Irish resources is made clear from a recent
    publication that Mr. Chamberlain's "Tariff Commission" issued
    towards the end of 1912.</p>

    <p>This document, entitled "The Economic Position of Ireland
    and its relation to Tariff Reform," constitutes, in fact, a
    manifesto calling for the release of Ireland from the exclusive
    grip of Great Britain. Thus, for instance, in the section
    "External Trade of Ireland," we learn that Ireland exported in
    1910, £63,400,000 worth of Irish produce. Of this Great Britain
    took £52,600,000 worth, while some £10,800,000 went either to
    foreign countries, or to British colonies, over £4,000,000
    going to the United States. Of these eleven million pounds
    worth of Irish produce sent to distant countries, only £700,000
    was shipped direct from Irish ports.</p>

    <p>The remainder, more than £10,000,000, although the market it
    was seeking lay chiefly to the West, had to be shipped East
    into and to pay a heavy transit toll to that country for
    discharge, handling, agency, commission, and reloading on
    British vessels in British ports to steam back past the shores
    of Ireland it had just left. While Ireland, indeed, lies in the
    "line of trade," between all Northern Europe and the great
    world markets, she has been robbed
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page30"
       id="page30"></a>[pg 30]</span> of her trade and artificially
       deprived of the very position assigned to her by nature in
       the great tides of commercial intercourse. It is not only
       the geographical situation and the trade and wealth of
       Ireland that England has laid hands on for her own
       aggrandizement, but she has also appropriated to her own
       ends the physical manhood of the island. Just as the
       commerce has been forcibly annexed and diverted from its
       natural trend, so the youth of Ireland has been fraudulently
       appropriated and diverted from the defence of their own land
       to the extension of the power and wealth of the realm that
       impoverished it at home. The physical qualities of the Irish
       were no less valuable than "Irish wool" to Empire building,
       provided always they were not displayed in Ireland.</p>

    <p>So long ago as 1613 we find a candid admission in the State
    papers that the Irish were the better men in the field. "The
    next rebellion whenever it shall happen, doth threaten more
    danger to the State than any heretofore, when the cities and
    walled towns were always faithful; (1) because they have the
    same bodies they ever had and therein they had and have
    advantage of us; (2) from infancy they have been and are
    exercised in the use of arms; (3) the realm by reason of the
    long peace was never so full of youths; (4) that they are
    better soldiers than heretofore, their continental employment
    in wars abroad assures us, and they do conceive that their men
    are better than ours."</p>

    <p>This testimony to Irish superiority, coming as it does from
    English official sources just three hundred years ago, would be
    convincing enough did it stand alone. But it is again and again
    reaffirmed by English commanders themselves as the reason for
    their failure in some particular enterprise. In all else they
    were superior to the Irish; in arms, armaments, munitions,
    supplies of food and money, here the long purse, settled
    organization and greater commerce of England, gave her an
    overwhelming advantage. Moreover the English lacked the moral
    restraints that imposed so severe a handicap on the Irish in
    their resistance. They owned no scruple of conscience in
    committing any crime that served their purpose. Beaten often in
    open fight by the hardier bodies, stouter arms and greater
    courage of the Irishmen, they nevertheless won the game by
    recourse to means that no Irishman, save he who had joined them
    for purposes of revenge or in pursuit of selfish personal aims,
    could possibly have adopted. The fight from the first was an
    unequal one. Irish valour, chivalry, and personal strength were
    matched against wealth, treachery and cunning. The Irish better
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page31"
       id="page31"></a>[pg 31]</span> bodies were overcome by the
       worse hearts. As Curran put it in 1817&mdash;"The triumph of
       England over Ireland is the triumph of guilt over
       innocence."</p>

    <p>The Earl of Essex who came to Ireland in 1599 with one of
    the largest forces of English troops that, up to then, had ever
    been dispatched into Ireland (18,000 men), had ascribed his
    complete failure, in writing to the Queen, to the physical
    superiority of the Irish:</p>

    <p>"These rebels are more in number than your Majesty's army
    and have (though I do unwillingly confess it), better bodies,
    and perfecter use of their arms, than those men who your
    Majesty sends over."</p>

    <p>The Queen, who followed the war in Ireland with a swelling
    wrath on each defeat, and a growing fear that the Spaniards
    would keep their promise to land aid to the Irish princes,
    O'Neill and O'Donnell, issued "instructions" and a set of
    "ordinances" for the conduct of the war in Ireland, which,
    while enjoining recourse to the usual methods outside the field
    of battle&mdash;(i.e. starvation, "politic courses,"
    assassination of leaders; and the sowing of dissension by means
    of bribery and promises), required for the conflict, that her
    weaker soldiers should be protected against the onslaught of
    the unarmoured Irishmen by head pieces of steel. She ordered
    "every soldier to be enforced to wear a murrion, because the
    enemy is encouraged by the advantage of arms to <i>come to the
    sword</i> wherein he commonly prevaileth."</p>

    <p>One of the generals of the Spanish King, Philip III, who
    came to Ireland in the winter of 1601 with a handful of Spanish
    troops (200 men), to reinforce the small expedition of de
    Aguila in Kinsale, thus reported on the physical qualities of
    the Irish in a document that still lies in Salamanca in the
    archives of the old Irish College. it was written by Don Pedro
    De Zubiarr on the 16th of January, 1602, on his return to the
    Asturias. Speaking of the prospect of the campaign, he wrote:
    "If we had brought arms for 10,000 men we could have had them,
    for they are very eager to carry on the war against the
    English. The Irish are very strong and well shaped, accustomed
    to endure hunger and toil, and very courageous in fight."</p>

    <p>Perhaps the most vivid testimony to the innate superiority
    of the Irishman as a soldier is given in a typically Irish
    challenge issued in the war of 1641. The document has a lasting
    interest for it displays not only the "better body" of the
    Irishman of that <span class="pagenum"><a name="page32"
       id="page32"></a>[pg 32]</span> day, but something of his
       better heart as well, that still remains to us.</p>

    <p>One Parsons, an English settler in Ireland, had written to a
    friend to say that, among other things, the head of the Colonel
    of an Irish regiment then in the field against the English,
    would not be allowed to stick long on its shoulders. The letter
    was intercepted by the very regiment itself, and a captain in
    it, Felim O'Molloy, wrote back to Parsons:</p>

    <p>"I will do this if you please: I will pick out sixty men and
    fight against one hundred of your choice men if you do but
    pitch your camp one mile out of your town, and then if you have
    the victory, you may threaten my Colonel; otherwise, do not
    reckon your chickens before they are hatched."</p>

    <p>The Anglo-Saxon preferred "politic courses" to accepting the
    Irish soldier's challenge, even where all the advantage was
    conceded by the Irishman to his foe and all the risks, save
    that of treachery (a very necessary precaution in dealing with
    the English in Ireland), cheerfully accepted by the Celt.</p>

    <p>This advantage of the "better bodies" the Irish retained
    beyond all question up to the Famine. It was upon it alone that
    the Wexford peasantry relied in 1798, and with and by it alone
    that they again and again, armed with but pike and scythe swept
    disciplined regiments of English mercenaries in headlong rout
    from the field.</p>

    <p>This physical superiority of his countrymen was frequently
    referred to by O'Connell as one of the forces he relied on.
    With the decay of all things Irish that has followed the
    Famine, these physical attributes have declined along with so
    much else that was typical of the nation and the man.</p>

    <p>It could not to-day be fearlessly affirmed that sixty
    Irishmen were more than a match for one hundred Englishmen; yet
    depleted as it is by the emigration of its strongest and
    healthiest children, by growing sickness and a changed and
    deteriorated diet the Irish race still presents a type,
    superior physically, intellectually and morally to the English.
    It was on Irish soldiers that the English chiefly relied in the
    Boer War, and it is no exaggeration to say that could all the
    Irishmen in the ranks of the British army have been withdrawn,
    a purely British force would have failed to end the war and the
    Dutch would have remained masters of the field in South
    Africa.</p>

    <p>It was the inglorious part of Ireland to be linked with
    those "methods of barbarism" she herself knew only too well, in
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page33"
       id="page33"></a>[pg 33]</span> extinguishing the
       independence of a people who were attacked by the same enemy
       and sacrificed to the same greed that had destroyed her own
       freedom.</p>

    <p>Unhappy, indeed, is it for mankind, as for her own fate and
    honour that Ireland should be forced by dire stress of fortune
    to aid her imperial wrecker in wrecking the fortune and freedom
    of brave men elsewhere.</p>

    <p>That these physical qualities of Irishmen, even with a
    population now only one tenth that of Great Britain are still
    of value to the empire, Mr. Churchill's speech on the Home Rule
    Bill made frankly clear (February, 1913). We now learn that the
    First Lord of the Admiralty has decided to establish a new
    training squadron, "with a base at Queenstown," where it is
    hoped to induce with the bribe of "self-government" the youth
    of Cork and Munster to again man the British fleet as they did
    in the days of Nelson, and we are even told that the prospects
    of brisk recruiting are "politically favourable."</p>

    <p>Carthage got her soldiers from Spain, her seamen, her
    slingers from the Balearic Islands and the coasts of Africa,
    her money from the trade of the world. Rome beat her, but she
    did not leave a defeated Carthage to still levy toll of men and
    mind on those external sources of supply.</p>

    <p>Germany must fight, not merely to defeat the British fleet
    of to-day, but to neutralize the British fleet of to-morrow.
    Leave Ireland to Great Britain and that can never be.
    Neutralize Ireland and it is already accomplished.</p>

    <p>One of the conditions of peace, and <i>for this reason</i>
    the most important condition of peace that a victorious Germany
    must impose upon her defeated antagonist is that Ireland shall
    be separated and erected into an independent European State
    under international guarantees. England, obviously would resist
    such conditions to the last, but then the last has already come
    before England would consent to any peace save on terms she
    dictated.</p>

    <p>A defeated England is a starved England. She would have to
    accept whatever terms Germany imposed unless those terms
    provoked external intervention on behalf of the defeated
    power.</p>

    <p>The prize Germany seeks to win from victory is not immediate
    territorial aggrandizement obtained from annexing British
    possessions, not a heavy money indemnity wrung from British
    finance and trade (although this she might have), but German
    freedom throughout the world on equal terms with Britain. This
    is a prize <span class="pagenum"><a name="page34"
       id="page34"></a>[pg 34]</span> worth fighting for, for once
       gained the rest follows as a matter of course.</p>

    <p>German civilization released from the restricted confines
    and unequal position in which Britain had sought to pen it
    must, of itself win its way to the front, and of necessity
    acquire those favoured spots necessary to its wide
    development.</p>

    <p>"This is the meaning of his (the German's) will for power;
    safety from interference with his individual and national
    development. Only one thing is left to the nations that do not
    want to be left behind in the peaceful rivalry of human
    progress&mdash;that is to become the equals of Germany in
    untiring industry, in scientific thoroughness, in sense of
    duty, in patient persistence, in intelligent, voluntary
    submission to organization." (History of German Civilization,
    by Ernst Richard, Columbia University, New York.)</p>

    <p>Once she had reduced Great Britain to an opposition based on
    <i>peaceful rivalry</i> in human progress, Germany would find
    the path of success hers to tread on more than equal terms, and
    many fields of expansion now closed would readily open to
    German enterprise without that people incurring and inflicting
    the loss and injury that an attempted invasion of the great
    self-governing dominions would so needlessly involve. Most of
    the British self-governing colonies are to-day great States,
    well able to defend themselves from overseas attack. The defeat
    of the British navy would make scarcely at all easier the
    landing of German troops in, say, Australia, South Africa or
    New Zealand. A war of conquest of those far-distant regions
    would be, for Germany, an impossible and a stupidly impossible
    task.</p>

    <p>A defeated England could not cede any of these British
    possessions as a price of peace, for they are inhabited by free
    men who, however they might deplore a German occupation of
    London, could in no wise be transferred by any pact or treaty
    made by others, to other rule than that of themselves.
    Therefore, to obtain those British dominions, Germany would
    have to defeat not only England, but after that to begin a
    fresh war, or a series of fresh wars, at the ends of the earth,
    with exhausted resources and probably a crippled fleet.</p>

    <p>The thing does not bear inspection and may be dismissed from
    our calculation.</p>

    <p>The only territories that England could cede by her own act
    to a victorious power are such as, in themselves, are not
    suited to colonization by a white race. Doubtless, Germany
    would seek <span class="pagenum"><a name="page35"
       id="page35"></a>[pg 35]</span> compensation for the expense
       of the war in requiring the transfer of some of these latter
       territories of the British Crown to herself. There are
       points in tropical Africa, in the East, islands in the ocean
       to-day flying the British flag that might, with profit to
       German trade and influence, be acquired by a victorious
       Germany. But none of these things in itself, not all of them
       put together, would meet the requirements of the German
       case, or ensure to Germany that future tranquil expansion
       and peaceful rivalry the war had been fought to secure.
       England would be weakened, and to some extent impoverished
       by a war ending with such results; but her great asset, her
       possession beyond price would still be hers&mdash;her
       geographical position. Deprive her to-day, say of the Gold
       Coast, the Niger, Gibraltar, even of Egypt, impose a heavy
       indemnity, and while Germany would barely have recouped
       herself for the out-of-pocket losses of the war, England in
       fact would have lost nothing, and ten years hence the Teuton
       would look out again upon the same prospect, a Europe still
       dominated beyond the seas by the Western islanders.</p>

    <p>The work would have to be done all over again. A second
    Punic war would have to be fought with this
    disadvantage&mdash;that the Atlantic Sicily would be held and
    used still against the Northern Rome, by the Atlantic
    Carthage.</p>

    <p>A victorious Germany, in addition to such terms as she may
    find it well to impose in her own immediate financial or
    territorial interests, must so draft her peace conditions as to
    preclude her great antagonist from ever again seriously
    imperilling the freedom of the seas. I know of no way save one
    to make sure the open seas. Ireland, in the name of Europe, and
    in the exercise of European right to free the seas from the
    over-lordship of one European island, must be resolutely
    withdrawn from British custody. A second Berlin Conference, an
    international Congress must debate, and clearly would debate,
    with growing unanimity the German proposal to restore Ireland
    to Europe.</p>

    <p>The arguments in favour of that proposal would soon become
    so clear from the general European standpoint, that save
    England and her defeated allies, no power would oppose it.</p>

    <p>Considerations of expediency no less than naval, mercantile,
    and moral claims would range themselves on the side of Germany
    and a free Ireland. For a free Ireland, not owned and exploited
    by England, but appertaining to Europe at large, its ports
    available in a sense they never can be while under British
    control for purposes <span class="pagenum"><a name="page36"
       id="page36"></a>[pg 36]</span> of general navigation and
       overseas intercourse, would soon become of such first-rank
       importance in continental affairs as to leave men stupified
       by the thought that for five hundred years they had allowed
       one sole member of their community the exclusive use and
       selfish misappropriation of this, the most favoured of
       European islands.</p>

    <p>Ireland would be freed, not because she deserved or asked
    for freedom, not because English rule has been a tyranny, a
    moral failure, a stupidity and sin against the light; not
    because Germany cared for Ireland, but because her withdrawal
    from English control appeared to be a very necessary step in
    international welfare and one very needful to the progress of
    German and European expansion.</p>

    <p>An Ireland released from the jail in which England had
    confined her would soon become a populous State of possibly
    10,000,000 to 12,000,000 people, a commercial asset of Europe
    in the Atlantic of the utmost general value, one holding an
    unique position between the Old and New Worlds, and possibly an
    intellectual and moral asset of no mean importance. This, and
    more, a sovereign Ireland means to Europe. Above all it means
    security of transit, equalizing of opportunity, freedom of the
    seas&mdash;an assurance that the great waterways of the ocean
    should no longer be at the absolute mercy of one member of the
    European family, and that one the least interested in general
    European welfare.</p>

    <p>The stronger a free Ireland grew the surer would be the
    guarantee that the rôle of England "consciously assumed for
    many years past, to be an absolute and wholly arbitrary judge
    of war and peace" had gone for ever, and that at last the
    "balance of power" was kept by fair weight and fair measure and
    not with loaded
    scales.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page37"
       id="page37"></a>[pg 37]</span>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter IV</h3>

    <h2>THE ENEMY OF PEACE</h2>

    <p>I believe England to be the enemy of European peace, and
    that until her "mastery of the sea" is overmastered by Europe,
    there can be no peace upon earth or goodwill among men. Her
    claim to rule the seas, and the consequences, direct and
    indirect, that flow from its assertion are the chief factors of
    international discord that now threaten the peace of the
    world.</p>

    <p>In order to maintain that indefensible claim she is driven
    to aggression and intrigue in every quarter of the globe; to
    setting otherwise friendly peoples by the ears; to forming
    "alliances" and ententes, to dissolving friendships, the aim
    always being the old one, <i>divide et impera</i>.</p>

    <p>The fact that Europe to-day is divided into armed camps is
    mainly due to English effort to retain that mastery of the sea.
    It is generally assumed, and the idea is propagated by English
    agencies, that Europe owes her burden of armaments to the
    antagonism between France and Germany, to the loss of
    Alsace-Lorraine by France, and the spirit and hope of a
    <i>revanche</i> thereby engendered. But this antagonism has
    long ceased to be the chief factor that moulds European
    armaments.</p>

    <p>Were it not for British policy, and the unhealthy hope it
    proffers France would ere this have resigned herself, as the
    two provinces have done, to the solution imposed by the war of
    1870. It is England and English ambition that beget the state
    of mind responsible for the enormous growth of armaments that
    now over-shadows continental civilization. Humanity, hemmed in
    in Central Europe by a forest of bayonets and debarred all
    egress to the light of a larger world by a forbidding circle of
    dreadnoughts, is called to peace conferences and arbitration
    treaties by the very power whose fundamental maxim of rule
    ensures war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of
    the Old World.</p>

    <p>If Europe would not strangle herself with her own hands she
    must strangle the sea serpent whose coils enfold her
    shores.</p>

    <p>Inspect the foundation of European armaments where we will,
    and we shall find that the master builder is he who fashioned
    the British Empire. It is that empire, its claim to universal
    right of pre-emption to every zone and region washed by the
    waves and useful and necessary for the expansion of the white
    races, and its assertion of a right to control at will all the
    seas of all the world that drives the peoples of Europe into
    armed camps. The policy <span class="pagenum"><a name="page38"
       id="page38"></a>[pg 38]</span> of the Boer War is being
       tried on a vaster scale against Europe. Just as England beat
       the Boers by concentration camps and not by arms, by money
       and not by men, so she seeks to-day to erect an armourplate
       barrier around the one European people she fears to meet in
       the field, and to turn all Central Europe into a vast
       concentration camp. By use of the longest purse she has
       already carried this barrier well towards completion. One
       gap remains, and it is to make sure that this opening, too,
       shall be closed that she now directs all the force of her
       efforts. Here the longest purse is of less avail, so England
       draws upon another armoury. She appeals to the longest
       tongue in history&mdash;the longest and something else.</p>

    <p>In order to make sure the encompassing of Europe with a
    girdle of steel it is necessary to circle the United States
    with a girdle of lies. With America true to the great policy of
    her great founder, an America, "the friend of all powers but
    the ally of none," English designs against European
    civilization must in the end fail. Those plans can succeed only
    by active American support, and to secure this is now the
    supreme task and aim of British stealth and skill. Every tool
    of her diplomacy, polished and unpolished, from the trained
    envoy to the boy scout and the minor poet has been tried in
    turn. The pulpit, the bar, the press; the society hostess, the
    Cabinet Minister and the Cabinet Minister's wife, the
    ex-Cabinet Minister and the Royal Family itself, and last, but
    not least, even "Irish nationality"&mdash;all have been
    pilgrims to that shrine; and each has been carefully primed,
    loaded, well aimed, and then turned full on the weak spots in
    the armour of republican simplicity. To the success of these
    resources of panic the falsification of history becomes
    essential and the vilification of the most peace-loving people
    of Europe. The past relations of England with the United States
    are to be blotted out, and the American people who are by blood
    so largely Germanic, are to be entrapped into an attitude of
    suspicion, hostility and resentment against the country and
    race from whom they have received nothing but good. Germany is
    represented as the enemy, not to England's indefensible claim
    to own the seas, but to American ideals on the American
    continent. Just as the Teuton has become the "enemy of
    civilization" in the Old World because he alone has power,
    strength of mind, and force of purpose to seriously dispute the
    British hegemony of the seas, so he is assiduously represented
    as the only threat to American hegemony of the New World.</p>

    <p>This, the key note of the attack on Germany, is sounded from
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page39"
       id="page39"></a>[pg 39]</span> every corner of the British
       Empire, wherever the Imperial editor, resting on the labours
       of the lash he wields against the coloured toilers in mine
       and camp, directs his eyes from the bent forms of these
       indentured slaves of dividend to the erect and stalwart
       frames of the new Goths who threaten the whole framework of
       Imperial dividend from across the North Sea. From the
       <i>Times</i> to the obscurest news-sheet of the remotest
       corner of the British Dominions the word has gone forth.</p>

    <p>The Monroe Doctrine, palladium of the Anglo-Saxon world
    empire, is imperilled by German ambitions, and were it not for
    the British fleet, America would be lost to the Americans.
    Wherever Englishmen are gathered to-day their journals,
    appealing possibly to only a handful of readers, assert that
    the function of the British fleet is to exclude the European
    States, with Germany at their head, from South America, not
    because in itself that is a right and worthy end to pursue, but
    because that continent is earmarked for future exploitation and
    control by their "kinsmen" of the United States, and they need
    the support of those "kinsmen" in their battle against
    Germany.</p>

    <p>I need quote but a single utterance from the mass of
    seditious libels of this character before me to show how
    widespread is the propaganda of falsehood and how sustained is
    the effort being made to poison the American mind against the
    only people in Europe England genuinely fears, and therefore
    wholeheartedly hates.</p>

    <p>The <i>Natal Mercury</i> for instance, a paper written for
    the little town of Durban and appealing to a population of only
    some 30,000 whites, in a recent issue (March, 1913), devoted a
    leader to the approaching "Peace Centennial" of 1914, to be
    held in commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent,
    which ended the second war between Great Britain and the
    American people in 1814.</p>

    <p>"After all, blood is thicker than water," quotes the Natal
    journal with satisfaction, and after pointing out some latter
    day indications of rapprochement between England and the United
    States, it goes on to proclaim the chief function of the
    British navy and the claim thereby established on the goodwill
    of America.</p>

    <p>"We make mention of them because such incidents are likely
    to repeat themselves more and more frequently in that
    competition for naval supremacy in Europe which compels the
    United States to put her own fleets into working order and to
    join in the work that England has hitherto been obliged to
    perform
    <i>unaided</i>.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page40"
       id="page40"></a>[pg 40]</span>

    <p>"It is England that polices the Seven Seas, and America has
    reaped no small benefits from the <i>self-imposed task</i>, an
    aspect of the matter to which every thoughtful American is
    alive. There is a real and hearty recognition in the New World
    of the <i>silent barrier</i> that Great Britain has set up to
    what might become something more than a dream of expansion into
    South America on the part of <i>one</i> potent European State.
    It is, indeed, hardly too much to say that the maintenance of
    the Monroe Doctrine is at the present moment almost as fully
    guaranteed by England as it is by the country that enunciated
    the policy and is the chief gainer by it. It is a case in which
    a <i>silent understanding</i> is of far greater value than a
    formal compact that 'would serve as a target for casual
    discontent on this side or that'."</p>

    <p>The article concludes by proclaiming "the precious
    permanence of an unseen bond" and the lofty and enduring worth
    of "good faith mutually acknowledged and the ultimate
    solidarity of mutual interests rightly perceived." "The
    ultimate solidarity" aimed at by those who direct these
    world-wide pronouncements is not one of mere sterile friendship
    between the American and the British peoples. American
    friendship with England is only worth having when it can be
    translated by world acts into enmity against Germany.</p>

    <p>It might truly be said of the British Empire to-day that
    where two or three are gathered together, there hatred of
    Germany shall be in the midst of them. Turn where he will, from
    the Colonies to England, from England to her fleet, from the
    seas to the air, the Englishman lives and moves and has his
    being in an atmosphere not of love but of hatred. And this too,
    a hatred, fear, and jealousy of a people who have never injured
    him, who have never warred upon him, and whose sole crime is
    that they are highly efficient rivals in the peaceful rivalry
    of commerce, navigation, and science.</p>

    <p>We are told, for instance, in one of the popular London
    magazines for January, 1913, in an article upon the financial
    grievances of the British navy that were it not for Germany
    there would be to-day another Spithead. "Across the North Sea
    is a nation that some fifty years ago was so afraid of the
    British navy that it panicked itself into building an iron-clad
    fleet.</p>

    <p>"To-day, as the second naval power, its menace is too great
    for any up-to-date Spithead mutiny to come off. But the pay
    question was so acute that it is possibly only the Germans and
    their 'menace' that saved us from the trouble."
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page41"
       id="page41"></a>[pg 41]</span> But while the "patriotism" of
       the "lower-deck" may have been sufficiently stout to avert
       this peril, the patriotism of the "quarter-deck" is giving
       us a specimen of its quality that certainly could not be
       exhibited in any other country in the world.</p>

    <p>Even as I write I read in the "British Review" how Admiral
    Sir Percy Scott attacks Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, dubs
    him the "laughing-stock of the fleet," accuses him of
    publishing in his book <i>The Betrayal</i> a series of
    "deliberate falsehoods," and concludes by saying that the
    gallant Admiral is "not a seaman."</p>

    <p>And it is a fleet commanded by such Admirals as these that
    is to sweep the German navy from the seas!</p>

    <p>During the Crimean war the allied British and French navies
    distinguished themselves by their signal failure to effect the
    reduction of such minor fortresses as Sveaborg, Helsingfors,
    and the fortified lighthouses upon the Gulf of Finland. Their
    respective Admirals fired their severest broadsides into each
    other, and the bombardment of the forts was silenced by the
    smart interchange of nautical civilities between the two
    flagships. Napoleon III, who sought an explanation of this
    failure of his fleet, was given a reply that I cannot refrain
    from recommending to the British Admiralty to-day. "Well,
    Sire," replied the French diplomatist, who knew the
    circumstances, "both the Admirals were old women, but ours was
    at least a lady." If British Admirals cannot put to sea without
    incurring this risk, they might, at least, take the gunboat
    woman with them to prescribe the courtesies of naval
    debate.</p>

    <p>That England to-day loves America, no one who goes to the
    private opinions of Englishmen, instead of to their public
    utterances, or the interested eulogies of their press, can for
    a moment believe.</p>

    <p>The old dislike is there, the old supercilious contempt for
    the "Yankee" and all his ways. "God's Englishman" no more loves
    an American citizen now than in 1846 when he seriously
    contemplated an invasion of the United States, and the raising
    of the negro-slave population against his "Anglo-Saxon
    kinsmen."</p>

    <p>To-day, when we hear so much of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance it
    may be well to revert to that page of history. For it will show
    us that if a British premier to-day can speak as Mr. Asquith
    did on December 16th, 1912, in his reference to the late
    American Ambassador as "a great American and a kinsman," one
    "sprung from a common race, speaking our own language, sharing
    with us by birth as by inheritance not a few of our most
    cherished traditions <span class="pagenum"><a name="page42"
       id="page42"></a>[pg 42]</span> and participating when he
       comes here by what I may describe as <i>his natural right in
       our domestic interests and celebrations</i>," then this
       new-found kinship takes its birth not in a sense of common
       race, indeed, but in a very common fear of Germany.</p>

    <p>In the year 1846, the British army was engaged in robbing
    the Irish people of their harvest in order that the work of the
    famine should be complete and that the then too great
    population of Ireland should be reduced within the limits "law
    and order" prescribed, either by starvation or flight to
    America.</p>

    <p>Fleeing in hundreds and thousands from the rule of one who
    claimed to be their Sovereign, expelled in a multitude
    exceeding the Moors of Spain, whom a Spanish king shipped
    across the seas with equal pious intent, the fugitive Irish
    Nation found friendship, hope, and homes in the great Celtic
    Republic of the West. All that was denied to them in their own
    ancient land they found in a new Ireland growing up across the
    Atlantic.</p>

    <p>The hate of England pursued them here and those who dared to
    give help and shelter. The United States were opening wide
    their arms to receive the stream of Irish fugitives and were
    saying very harsh things of England's infamous rule in Ireland.
    This could not be brooked. England in those days had not
    invented the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and a united
    Germany had not then been born to vex the ineptitude of her
    statesmen or to profit from the shortcomings of her
    tradesmen.</p>

    <p>So the greatest Ministers of Queen Victoria seriously
    contemplated war with America and naturally looked around for
    some one else to do the fighting. The Duke of Wellington hoped
    that France might be played on, just as in a later day a later
    Minister seeks to play France in a similar rôle against a later
    adversary.<a id="footnotetag3"
       name="footnotetag3"></a><a href="#footnote3"><sup>3</sup></a></p>

    <p>The Mexicans, too, might be induced to invade the Texan
    frontier. But a greater infamy than this was seriously planned.
    Again it is an Irishman who tells the story and shows us how
    dearly the English loved their trans-Atlantic "kinsmen" when
    there was no German menace to threaten nearer home.</p>

    <p>Writing from Carlsruhe, on January 26th, 1846, to his
    friend, Alexander Spencer, in Dublin, Charles Lever said: "As
    to the war the Duke<a id="footnotetag4"
       name="footnotetag4"></a><a href="#footnote4"><sup>4</sup></a>
       says he could smash the Yankees, and ought to do so while
       France in her present humour and Mexico opens the road to
       invasion from the South&mdash;not to speak of the terrible
       <span class="pagenum"><a name="page43"
       id="page43"></a>[pg 43]</span> threat that Napier uttered,
       that with two regiments of infantry and a field battery he'd
       <i>raise the slave population in the United States</i>."</p>

    <p>The infamy of this suggestion cannot be surpassed. The
    brilliant soldier who conceived it was the chivalrous
    Englishman who conquered Scinde, one of the chief glories of
    the Britannic hierarchy of soldier-saints.</p>

    <p>The Government planning it was that of the late Queen
    Victoria with the Duke of Wellington's advice, and the people
    against whom the black-slave millions were to be loosed were
    the "kith and kin" of those meditating this atrocious form of
    massacre. Truly, as an old Irish proverb, old even in the days
    of Henry VIII. put it, "the pride of France, the <i>treason of
    England</i> and the warre of Ireland shall never have end."</p>

    <p>As a latter day witness of that treason, one who had
    suffered it from birth to the prison cell, a dead Irishman
    speaks to us from the grave. Michael Davitt in a letter to
    Morrison Davidson on August 2701, 1902, thus summed up in final
    words what every Irishman feels in his heart:</p>

    <p>"The idea of being ruled by Englishmen is to me the chief
    agony of existence. They are a nation without faith, truth or
    conscience enveloped in a panoplied pharisaism and an incurable
    hypocrisy. Their moral appetite is fed on falsehood. They
    profess Christianity and believe only in Mammon. They talk of
    liberty while ruling India and Ireland against the principles
    of a constitution, professed as a political faith, but
    prostituted to the interests of class and landlord rule."</p>

    <p>Have Englishmen in less than two generations substituted
    love for the hate that Napier, Wellington, and the Queen's
    Ministers felt and expressed in 1846 for the people of the
    United States? Is it love to-day for America or fear of someone
    else that impels to the "Arbitration Treaties" and the
    celebration of the "Hundred years of Peace?"</p>

    <p>The Anglo-American "Peace Movement" was to be but the first
    stage in an "Anglo-Saxon Alliance," intended to limit and
    restrict all further world changes, outside of certain
    prescribed continental limits, to these two peoples alone on
    the basis of a new "Holy Alliance," whose motto should be
    <i>Beati possidentes</i>.</p>

    <p>Since England and America, either in fact or by reservation
    enjoy almost all the desirable regions of the earth, why not
    bring <span class="pagenum"><a name="page44"
       id="page44"></a>[pg 44]</span> about a universal agreement
       to keep everyone in his right place, to stay "just as we
       are," and to kindly refer all possible differences to an
       "International Tribunal?"</p>

    <p>Once again the British Bible was thrown into the scale, and
    the unrighteousness of Germany, who did not see her way to join
    in the psalm singing, was exposed in a spirit of bitter
    resignation and castigated with an appropriate selection of
    texts. The Hague Tribunal would be so much nicer than a war of
    armaments! With no reckless rivalries and military expenditure
    there could be no question of the future of mankind.</p>

    <p>An idyllic peace would settle down upon the nations,
    contentedly possessing each in its own share of the good things
    of life, and no questionable ambitions would be allowed to
    disturb the buying and selling of the smaller and weaker
    peoples. The sincerity of the wish for universal arbitration
    can be best shown by England, when she, or any of the Powers to
    whom she appeals, will consent to submit the claim of one of
    the minor peoples she or they hold in subjection to the Hague
    Tribunal. Let France submit Madagascar and Siam, or her latest
    victim, Morocco, to the franchise of the Court. Let Russia
    agree to Poland or Finland seeking the verdict of this bench of
    appeal. Let England plead her case before the same high moral
    tribunal and allow Ireland, Egypt, or India to have the law of
    her. Then, and not until then, the world of little States and
    beaten peoples may begin to believe that the Peace Crusade has
    some foundations in honour and honesty&mdash;but not till
    then.</p>

    <p>Germany has had the straightforwardness and manliness to
    protest that she is still able to do her own shooting and that
    what she holds she will keep, by force if need be, and what she
    wants she will, in her own sure time, take, and by force too,
    if need be. Of the two cults the latter is the simpler,
    sincerer, and certainly the less dishonest.</p>

    <p>Irish-American linked with German-American keen-sighted
    hostility did the rest. The rivalry of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr.
    Taft aided, and the effort (for the time at any rate) has been
    wrecked, thereby plunging England into a further paroxysm of
    religious despondency and grave concern for German morals. This
    mood eventuated in Lord Haldane's "week end" trip to Berlin.
    The voice was the voice of Jacob, in spite of the hand of Esau.
    Mr. Churchill at Glasgow, showed the real hand and the mess of
    pottage so amiably offered at Berlin bought no German
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page45"
       id="page45"></a>[pg 45]</span> birthright. The Kreuz Zeitung
       rightly summed up the situation by pointing out that "Mr.
       Churchill's testimony can now be advanced as showing that
       the will of England alone comes in question as the exponent
       of peace, and that England for many years past has
       consciously assumed the rôle of an absolute and perfectly
       arbitrary judge of war and peace. It seems to us all the
       more significant that Mr. Churchill proposes also in the
       future to control, with the help of the strong navies of the
       Dominions, the trade and naval movements of all the Powers
       on the face of the earth&mdash;that is to say, his aim is to
       secure a world monopoly for England." There has never been
       any other thought in the English mind. As I said in Part I.
       of this paper, "British interests are first the control of
       all the seas of all the world in full military and
       commercial control. If this be not challenged peace is
       permitted; to dispute it seriously means war."</p>

    <p>Germany is driven by necessity to dispute it seriously and
    to overcome it. She cannot get out to play her part in world
    life, <i>nay, she cannot hope to ultimately maintain herself at
    home</i> until that battle has been fought and won.</p>

    <p>Arrangements with England, detentes, understandings, call
    them what you will, are merely parleys before the fight. The
    assault must be delivered, the fortress carried, or else
    Germany, and with her Europe, must resign the mission of the
    white races and hand over the government and future of the
    world to one chosen people.</p>

    <p>Europe reproduces herself yearly at the present time at the
    rate of about five million souls. Some three-fifths of the
    number are to-day absorbed into the life of the Continent, the
    balance go abroad and principally to North America, to swell
    the English-speaking world. Germany controls about one-fifth of
    Europe's natural annual increase, and realising that emigration
    to-day means only to lose her people and build up her
    antagonist's strength, she has for years now striven to keep
    her people within German limits, and hitherto with successful
    results far in excess of any achieved by other European States.
    But the limit must be reached, and that before many years are
    past. Where is Germany to find the suitable region, both on a
    scale and under conditions of climate, health and soil that a
    people of say 90,000,000 hemmed in a territory little larger
    than France, will find commensurate to their needs? No European
    people is in such plight.</p>

    <p>Russia has the immense and healthy world of Siberia into
    which to overflow. France, far from needing outlets, increases
    not at all, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page46"
       id="page46"></a>[pg 46]</span> and during 1911 showed an
       excess of close on 40,000 deaths over births. For France the
       day of greatness is past. A French Empire, in any other
       sense than the Roman one of commercial and military
       exploitation of occupied territories and subjugated peoples
       is gone forever.</p>

    <p>France has no blood to give except in war. French blood will
    not colonize even the Mediterranean littoral. Italy is faced
    with something of the same problem as Germany, but to a lesser
    extent. Her surplus population already finds a considerable
    outlet in Argentina and South Brazil, among peoples,
    institutions, and language largely approximating to those left
    behind. While Italy has, indeed need of a world policy as well
    as Germany, her ability to sustain a great part abroad cannot
    be compared to that of the Teutonic people. Her claim is not so
    urgent; her need not so insistent, her might inadequate.</p>

    <p>The honesty and integrity of the German mind, the strength
    of the German intellect, the skill of the German hand and
    brain, and justice and vigour of German law, the intensity of
    German culture, science, education and social development,
    these need a great and healthy field for their beneficial
    display, and the world needs these things more than it needs
    the British mastery of the seas. The world of European life
    needs to-day, as it needed in the days of a decadent Roman
    Empire, the coming of another Goth, the coming of the Teuton.
    The interposing island in the North Sea alone intervenes. How
    to surmount that obstacle, how to win the freedom of the "Seven
    Seas" for Europe must be the supreme issue for Germany.</p>

    <p>If she falls she is doomed to sterility. The supreme test of
    German genius, of German daring, of German discipline and
    imagination lies there.</p>

    <p>Where Louis XIV., the Directory, and Napoleon failed, will
    the heirs of Karl the Great see clearly?</p>

    <p>And then, when that great hour has struck, will Germany,
    will Europe, produce the statesman soldier who shall see that
    the key to ocean freedom lies in that island beyond an island,
    whose very existence Europe has forgotten?</p>

    <p>Till that key is out from the Pirate's girdle, Germany may
    win a hundred "Austerlitzes" on the Vistula, the Dnieper, the
    Loire, but until she restores that key to Europe, to paraphrase
    Pitt, she may "roll up that map of the world; it will not be
    wanted these fifty years."</p>

    <blockquote class="footnote">
        <a id="footnote3"
                    name="footnote3"></a><b>Footnote 3:</b>
                    <a href="#footnotetag3">(return)</a>

        <p>Sir Edward Grey and the <i>Entente Cordiale</i>.</p>
    </blockquote>

    <blockquote class="footnote">
        <a id="footnote4"
                    name="footnote4"></a><b>Footnote 4:</b>
                    <a href="#footnotetag4">(return)</a>

        <p>The Duke of Wellington: the report was brought to Lever
        by the Marquis of Douro, the Duke's heir.</p>
    </blockquote><span class="pagenum"><a name="page47"
       id="page47"></a>[pg 47]</span>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter V</h3>

    <h2>THE PROBLEM OF THE NEAR WEST</h2>

    <p>The foregoing reflections and the arguments drawn from them
    were penned before the outbreak of the war between Turkey and
    the Balkan Allies.</p>

    <p>That war is still undecided as I write (March 1913), but
    whatever its precise outcome may be, it is clear that the doom
    of Turkey as a great power is sealed, and that the
    complications of the Near East will, in future, assume an
    entirely fresh aspect. Hitherto, there was only the possibility
    that Germany might find at least a commercial and financial
    outlet in the Asiatic dominions of the Sultan. There was even
    the possibility, had Turkey held together, that England, to
    mitigate pressure elsewhere, would have conceded to an
    expanding and insistent Germany, a friendly interest and
    control in Asia Minor. It is true that the greatest possible
    development, and under the most favoured conditions of German
    interests in that region, could not have met the needs or
    satisfied the ever increasing necessities of Teutonic growth;
    but at least it would have offered a safety valve, and could
    have involved preoccupations likely to deflect the German
    vision, for a time, from the true path to greatness, the
    Western highways of the sea.</p>

    <p>An occupation or colonisation of the Near East by the
    Germanic peoples could never have been a possible solution
    under any circumstances of the problem that faces German
    statemanship. As well talk of reviving the Frank Kingdom of
    Jerusalem.</p>

    <p>The occupation by the fair-haired peoples of the Baltic and
    North Seas of the lands of Turk and Tartar, of Syrian and Jew,
    of Armenian and Mesopotamian, was never a practical suggestion
    or one to be seriously contemplated. "East is East and West is
    West," sings the poet of Empire, and Englishmen cannot complain
    if the greatest of Western peoples, adopting the singer, should
    apply the dogma to themselves. Germany, indeed, might have
    looked for a considerable measure of commercial dominance in
    the Near East, possibly for a commercial protectorate such as
    France applies to Tunis and Algeria and hopes to apply to
    morocco, or such as England imposes on Egypt, and this
    commercial predominance could have conferred considerable
    profits on Rhenish industries and benefited Saxon
    industrialism, but it could never have done more than this. A
    colonisation of the realms of Bajazet and Saladin by the
    fair-skinned peoples of the North, or the planting of Teutonic
    institutions in the valley of Damascus, even with the
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page48"
       id="page48"></a>[pg 48]</span> benevolent neutrality of
       England, is a far wider dream (and one surely no German
       statesman ever entertained) than a German challenge to the
       sea supremacy of England.</p>

    <p>The trend of civilized man in all great movements since
    modern civilization began, has been from East to West, not from
    West to East. The tide of the peoples moved by some mysterious
    impulse from the dawn of European expansion has been towards
    the setting sun. The few movements that have taken place in the
    contrary direction have but emphasized the universality of this
    rule, from the days of the overthrow of Rome, if we seek no
    earlier date. The Crusades furnished, doubtless, the classic
    example. The later contrary instance, that of Russia towards
    Siberia, scarcely, if at all affects the argument, for there
    the Russian overthrow is filling up Northern rather than
    Eastern lands, and the movement involves to the Russian
    emigrant no change of climate, soil, law, language or
    environment while that emigrant himself belongs, perhaps, as
    much to Asia as to Europe.</p>

    <p>But whatever value to German development the possible
    chances of expansion in the Near East may have offered before
    the present Balkan war, those chances to-day, as the result of
    that war, scarcely exist. It is probably the perception of this
    outcome of the victory of the Slav States that has influenced
    and accelerated the characteristic change of English public
    opinion that has accompanied with shouts of derision the dying
    agonies of the Turk. "In matters of mind," as a recent English
    writer says in the <i>Saturday Review</i>, "the national
    sporting instinct does not exist. The English public invariably
    backs the winner." And just as the English public invariably
    backs the winner, British policy invariably backs the
    anti-German, or supposedly anti-German side in all world
    issues. "What 1912 seems to have effected is a vast
    aggrandizement of the Slavonic races in their secular struggle
    against the Teutonic races. Even a local and temporary triumph
    of Austria over Servia cannot conceal the fact that henceforth
    the way south-east to the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea is
    barred to the Germans."<a id="footnotetag5"
       name="footnotetag5"></a><a href="#footnote5"><sup>5</sup></a></p>

    <p>That is the outstanding fact that British public opinion
    perceives with growing pleasure from the break up of
    Turkey.</p>

    <p>No matter where the dispute or what the purpose of conflict
    may be, the supreme issue for England is "Where is
    Germany?"</p>

    <p>Against that side the whole weight of Great Britain will,
    openly or covertly, be thrown. German expansion in the Near
    East has <span class="pagenum"><a name="page49"
       id="page49"></a>[pg 49]</span> gone by the board, and in its
       place the development of Greek naval strength in the
       Mediterranean, to take its stand by the Triple Entente,
       comes to be jauntily considered, while the solid wedge of a
       Slav Empire or Federation, commanding in the near future
       2,000,000 of armed men is agreeably seen to be driven across
       South-eastern Europe between Austro-German efforts and the
       fallow lands of Asia Minor. These latter can safely be left
       in Turkish hands yet a while longer, until the day comes for
       their partition into "spheres of influence," just as Persia
       and parts of China are to-day being apportioned between
       Russia and England. This happy consummation, moreover, has
       fallen from heaven, and Turkey is being cut up for the
       further extension of British interests clearly by the act of
       God.</p>

    <p>The victory of the Balkan States becomes another triumph for
    the British Bible; it is the victory of righteousness over
    wrong-doing.</p>

    <p>The true virtue of the Balkan "Christians" lies in the
    possibility of their being moulded into an anti-German factor
    of great weight in the European conflict, clearly impending,
    and in their offering a fresh obstacle, it is hoped, to German
    world policy.</p>

    <p>Let us first inspect the moral argument on the lips of these
    professors. We are assured, by it, that the claim of the Balkan
    Allies to expel Turkey from Europe rests upon a just and
    historic basis.</p>

    <p>Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European
    provinces by a right of conquest only. What the sword took, die
    sword may take away. When the sword was struck from the
    Ottoman's grasp his right to anything it had given him fell
    too. Thus Adrianople, a city he has held for over five hundred
    years, must be given up to a new conqueror who never owned it
    in the past and who certainly has far less moral claim to be
    there to-day than the descendants of Selim's soldiers.</p>

    <p>But the moral argument brings strange revenges.</p>

    <p>If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace&mdash;"right
    of sword to be shattered by the sword"&mdash;what right has
    England to Ireland, to Dublin, to Cork? She holds Ireland by
    exactly the same title as that by which Turkey has hitherto
    held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonika&mdash;a right of invasion, of
    seizure, of demoralization. If Turkey's rights, nearly six
    hundred years old, can be shattered in a day by one successful
    campaign, and if the powers of Europe can insist, with justice,
    that this successful sword shall outweigh the occupation of
    centuries, then, indeed, have the Powers, led by
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page50"
       id="page50"></a>[pg 50]</span> England, furnished a
       precedent in the Near East which the victor in the next
       great struggle should not be slow to apply to the Near West,
       when a captive Ireland shall be rescued from the hands of a
       conqueror whose tide is no better, indeed somewhat worse
       than that of Turkey to Macedonia. And when the day of defeat
       shall strike for the Turkey of the Near West, then shall an
       assembled Europe remember the arguments of 1912-13 and a
       freed Ireland shall be justified on the very grounds England
       to-day has been the first to advance against a defeated
       Turkey.</p>

    <p>"But the Turk is an Asiatic," say the English Bashaws: to
    which indeed, Europe might aptly reply, "and are the English
    European or non-European?" The moral argument, and the "Asiatic
    argument" are strange texts for the desecrater of Christian
    Ireland to appeal to against that continent which she would
    fain hem in with Malayan and Indian battleships, and Canadian
    and Australasian dreadnoughts. Not the moral argument, but the
    anti-German argument, furnishes the real ground for the changed
    British attitude in the present war.</p>

    <p>The moral failure of Turkey, her inability to govern her
    Christian peoples is only the pretext: but just as the moral
    argument brings its strange revenges and shows an Ireland that
    has suffered all that Macedonia has suffered, and this at the
    hands of Christians, and not of Moslems, so the triumph of the
    Balkan Allies, far from benefiting Britain, must, in the end,
    react to her detriment.</p>

    <p>The present apparent injury to German interests by the
    closing of South-eastern Europe, and the road to Asia Minor,
    will inevitably force Germany to still more resolutely face the
    problem of opening the Western seaways. To think otherwise is
    to believe that Germany will accept a quite impossible position
    tamely and without a struggle.</p>

    <p>Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the new Southern Slav
    States on the South-east, with a vengeful France being incited
    on her Western frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany
    sees England preparing still mightier armaments to hold and
    close the seaways of the world. The Canadian naval vote, the
    Malayan "gift" of a battleship come as fresh rivets in the
    chain forged for the perpetual binding of the seas, or it might
    more truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the hands of
    die German people.</p>

    <p>We read in a recent London periodical how these latest naval
    developments portend the coming of the day when "the Imperial
    navy shall keep the peace of the seas as a policeman does the
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page51"
       id="page51"></a>[pg 51]</span> peace of the streets. The
       time is coming when a naval war (except by England), will be
       as relentlessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas."
       (<i>Review of Reviews</i>, December, 1912.)</p>

    <p>The naïve arrogance of this utterance is characteristically
    English. It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the
    Churchill Glasgow speech, and the fullest justification of the
    criticism of the Kreuz Zeitung already quoted. It does not
    stand alone; it could be paralleled in the columns of any
    English paper&mdash;Liberal as much as Conservative&mdash;every
    day in the week. Nothing is clearer than that no Englishman can
    think of other nations save in terms of permanent inferiority.
    Thus, for instance, in a November (1912) issue of the <i>Daily
    News</i> we find a representative Englishman (Sir R.
    Edgecumbe), addressing that Liberal journal in words that no
    one but an Englishman would dream of giving public utterance
    to. Sir R. Edgecumbe deprecated a statement that had gone round
    to the effect that the Malayan battleship was not a free gift
    of the toiling Tamils, Japanese, Chinese, and other rubber
    workers who make up, with a few Malays, the population of that
    peninsula, but was really the fruit of an arbitrary tax imposed
    upon these humble, but indifferent Asiatics by their English
    administration.</p>

    <p>Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgecumbe asserted these
    poor workers nourished a reverence "bordering on veneration"
    for the Englishman. "This is shown in a curious way by their
    refusing to call any European 'a white man' save the Englishman
    alone. The German trader, the Italian and Frenchman all are, in
    their speech coloured men."</p>

    <p>After this appreciation of themselves the English cannot
    object to the present writer's view that they are
    non-Europeans.</p>

    <p>Thus while the Eastern question is being settled while I
    write, by the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, England, who
    leads the cry in the name of Europe, is preparing the exclusion
    of Europe from all world affairs that can be dominated by sea
    power. Lands and peoples held for centuries by Turkey by a
    right not less moral than that by which England has held
    Ireland, are being forcibly restored to Europe. So be it.</p>

    <p>With settlement of the Eastern question by this act of
    restitution Europe must inevitably gain the clarity of vision
    to deal with the Western question by a similar act of
    restoration.</p>

    <p>The Western Macedonia must go the way of its Eastern fellow.
    Like those of the Orient, the problems of the Occident for
    Europe are twofold&mdash;a near Western and a far Western
    question. Ireland, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page52"
       id="page52"></a>[pg 52]</span> keeper of the seas,
       constitutes for Europe the near Western question.</p>

    <p>The freedom of those seas and their opening to all European
    effort alike on equal terms constitutes the far Western
    question. But in both cases the antagonist of Europe, the
    non-European power is the same. The challenge of Europe must be
    to England, and the champion of Europe must be and can be only
    Germany. No other European people has the power, the strength
    of mind, of purpose and of arm to accomplish the great act of
    deliverance. Europe too long blinded to her own vital interests
    while disunited, must now, under the guidance of a united
    Germany, resolutely face the problem of freeing the seas.</p>

    <p><i>That war of the seas is inevitable</i>. It may be fought
    on a continent; it may be waged in the air&mdash;it must be
    settled on the seas and it must mean either the freeing of
    those seas or the permanent exclusion of Europeans from the
    affairs of the world. It means for Europe the future, the very
    existence of European civilization as opposed to the
    Anglo-Saxon world domination. In that war, Germany will stand
    not alone as the champion of Europe, she will fight for the
    freedom of the world.</p>

    <p>As an Irishman I have no fear of the result to Ireland of a
    German triumph. I pray for it; for with the coming of that day
    the "Irish question" so dear to British politicians, becomes a
    European, a world question.</p>

    <p>With the humbling of Great Britain and the destruction of
    her sea ownership, European civilization assumes a new stature,
    and Ireland, oldest and yet youngest of the European peoples,
    shall enter into free partnership with the civilization,
    culture, and prosperity that that act of liberation shall bring
    to mankind.</p>

    <blockquote class="footnote">
        <a id="footnote5"
                    name="footnote5"></a><b>Footnote 5:</b>
                    <a href="#footnotetag5">(return)</a>

        <p>Mr. Frederick Harrison in the <i>English Review</i>,
        Jan., 1913.</p>
    </blockquote>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter VI</h3>

    <h2>THE DUTY OF CHRISTENDOM</h2>

    <p>It is only the truth that wounds. An Irishman to-day in
    dealing with Englishmen is forced, if he speak truly, to wound.
    That is why so many Irishmen do not speak the truth. The
    Irishman, whether he be a peasant, a farm labourer, however low
    in the scale of Anglicization he may have sunk, is still in
    imagination, if not always in manner, a gentleman.
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page53"
       id="page53"></a>[pg 53]</span> The Englishman is a gentleman
       by chance, by force of circumstances, by luck of birth, or
       some rare opportunity of early fellowship. The Irishman is a
       gentleman by instinct and shrinks from wounding the feelings
       of another man and particularly of the man who has wounded
       him. He scorns to take it out of him that way. That is why
       the task of misgoverning him has been so easy and has come
       so naturally to the Englishman. One of the chief grievances
       of the Irishman in the middle ages was that the man who
       robbed him was such a boor. Insult was added to injury in
       that the oppressor was no knight in shining armour, but a
       very churl of men; to the courteous and cultured Irishman a
       "bodach Sassenach," a man of low blood, of low cunning,
       caring only for the things of the body, with no veneration
       for the things of the spirit&mdash;with, in fine, no music
       in his soul. The things that the Irishman loved he could not
       conceive of. Without tradition or history himself he could
       not comprehend the passionate attachment of the Irishman to
       both, and he proceeded to wipe both out, so far as in him
       lay, from off the map of Ireland and from out the Irishman's
       consciousness.</p>

    <p>Having, as he believed, with some difficulty accomplished
    his task, he stands to-day amazed at the result. The Irishman
    has still a grievance&mdash;nay more, Ireland talks of
    "wrongs." But has she not got him? What more can she want
    except his purse? And, that too, she is now taking. In the
    indulgence of an agreeable self-conceit which supplies for him
    the want of imagination he sees Ireland to-day as a species of
    "sturdy beggar," half mendicant, half pickpocket&mdash;making
    off with the proceeds of his hard day's work. The past slips
    from him as a dream. Has he not for years now, well, for thirty
    years certainly, a generation, a life time, done all in his
    power to meet the demands of this incessant country that more
    in sorrow than in anger he will grant you, was misgoverned in
    the past. That was its misfortune, never his fault. This is a
    steadily recurring phase of the fixed hallucination in his
    blood. Ireland never <i>is</i>, but only always has been cursed
    by English rule. He himself, the Englishman of the day, is
    always a simple, bluff, good-hearted fellow. His father if you
    like, his grandfather very probably, misgoverned Ireland, but
    never he himself. Why, just look at him now, his hand never out
    of his pocket relieving the shrill cries of Irish distress.
    There she stands, a poverty-stricken virago at his door,
    shaking her bony fist at him, Celtic porter in her eye, the
    most fearful apparition in history, his charwoman, shaming
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page54"
       id="page54"></a>[pg 54]</span> him before the neighbours and
       demanding payment for long past spring cleanings that he,
       good soul, has forgotten all about or is quite certain were
       settled at the time. Yes, there she stands, the Irish
       charwoman, the old broom in her hand and preparing for one
       last sweep that shall make the house sweet and fit for her
       own children. And John Bull, honest, sturdy John Bull,
       believing the house to be his, thinks that the only thing
       between him and the woman is the matter of wages; that all
       she wants is an extra shilling. Ireland wants but one thing
       in the world. She wants her house to herself, and the
       stranger out of her house.</p>

    <p>While he is, in his heart, perfectly aware of this, John
    Bull (for the reasons given by Richard Cox), is quite
    determined that nothing shall get him out of the house.
    "Separation is unthinkable," say English Ministers. The task of
    Ireland is to-day what it always has been&mdash;to get the
    stranger out of the house. It is no shame to Ireland or her
    sons, that up to this they have failed in each attempt. Those
    attempts are pillars of fire in her history, beacons of light
    in the desert of sin, where the Irish Israel still wanders in
    search of the promised land. Few of the peoples in Europe who
    to-day make up the concert of powers, have, unaided, expelled
    the invader who held them down, and none has been in the
    situation of Ireland.</p>

    <p>As Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1890, "can anyone say we should
    have treated Ireland as we have done had she lain not between
    us and the ocean, but between us and Europe?"</p>

    <p>In introducing the scheme of mild Home Rule termed the
    Councils Bill in 1907, Mr. Birrell prefaced it with the remark
    that "separation was unthinkable&mdash;save in the event of
    some great world cataclysm." World cataclysms up to this have
    not reached Ireland&mdash;England intervened too well. She has
    maintained her hold by sea power. The lonely Andromeda saw afar
    off the rescuing Perseus, a nude figure on the coast of Spain
    or France, but long ere his flight reached her rock-bound feet
    she beheld him fall, bruised and mangled, and devoured by the
    watching sea monster.</p>

    <p>Had Italy been placed as Ireland is, cut off from all
    external succour save across a sea held by a relentless jailor,
    would she have been to-day a free people, ally of Austria on
    terms of high equality?</p>

    <p>The blood shed by the founders of modern Italy would all
    have been shed in vain&mdash;that blood that sanctified the
    sword of Garibaldi&mdash;had it not been for the selfish policy
    of Louis Napoleon and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page55"
       id="page55"></a>[pg 55]</span> the invading armies of
       France. Italy, no more than Ireland, could have shaken
       herself free had it not been for aid from abroad. The late
       Queen Victoria saw clearly the parallel, and as hereditary
       custodian of Ireland, Her Majesty protested against the
       effort then being made to release Italy from an Austrian
       prison, when she herself was so hard put to it to keep
       Ireland in an English jail. Writing to her Prime Minister on
       July 25th, 1848, Her Majesty said:&mdash;</p>

    <p>"The Queen must tell Lord John (Russell) what she has
    repeatedly told Lord Palmerston, but without apparent effect,
    that the establishment of an entente cordiale with the French
    Republic, for the purpose of driving the Austrians out of their
    dominions in Italy would be a disgrace to this country. That
    the French would attach the greatest importance to it and gain
    the greatest advantage from it, there can be no doubt of. But
    how will England appear before the world at the moment she is
    struggling for her supremacy in Ireland?..." and on Oct. 10th
    following Her Majesty wrote to her uncle, the first King of the
    Belgians (who owed his new minted crown to the Belgian people
    depriving the Dutch Sovereign of his "lawful possessions") in
    the following memorable words:</p>

    <p>"Really it is quite immoral, with Ireland quivering in our
    grasp, and ready to throw off her allegiance at any moment, for
    us to force Austria to give up her lawful possessions. What
    shall we say if Canada, Malta, etc., begin to trouble us? It
    hurts me terribly." (Page 237, Queen Victoria's letters,
    published by order of His Majesty, King Edward VII.)</p>

    <p>It hurt Ireland much more terribly, that failure to throw
    off the hand that held her "quivering in our grasp," so soon to
    stretch her "a corpse upon the dissecting table."</p>

    <p>Ireland has failed to win her freedom, not so much because
    she has failed to shed her blood, but because her situation in
    the world is just that unique situation I have sought to
    depict. Belonging to Europe, she has not been of Europe; and
    England with a persistency that would be admirable were it not
    so criminal in intention and effect, has bent all her efforts,
    all her vigour, an unswerving policy, and a pitiless sword to
    extend the limits of exclusion. To approach Ireland at all
    since the first English Sovereign laid hands upon it was "quite
    immoral." When Frederick of Hohenstaufen (so long ago as that!)
    sent his secretary (an Irishman) to Ireland we read that Henry
    III of England declared "it hurt him terribly," and ordered all
    the goings out and comings in of
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page56"
       id="page56"></a>[pg 56]</span> the returned Irish-German
       statesman to be closely watched.</p>

    <p>The dire offence of Hugh O'Neill to Elizabeth was far less
    his rebellion than his "practises" with Spain. At every
    cessation of arms during the Nine Years War he waged with
    England, she sought to obtain from him an abjuration of
    "foreign aid," chiefly "that of the Spaniard." "Nothing will
    become the traitor (O'Neill) more than his public confession of
    any Spanish practices, and his abjuration of any manner of
    harkening or combining with any foreigners."</p>

    <p>Could O'Neill be brought to publicly repudiate help from
    abroad it would have, the Queen thought, the effect that "in
    Spain... the hopes of such attempts might be extinguished."</p>

    <p>As long as the sea was open to Spain there was grave danger.
    If Spaniard and Irishman came close together O'Neill's offence
    was indeed "fit to be made vulgar"&mdash;all men would see the
    strength of combination, the weakness of isolation.</p>

    <p>"Send me all the news you receive from Spain for Tyrone doth
    fill all these parts with strange lies, although some part be
    true, that there came some munition." It was because O'Neill
    was a statesman and knew the imperative need to Ireland of
    keeping in touch with Europe that for Elizabeth he became "the
    chief traitor of Ireland&mdash;a reprobate from God, reserved
    for the sword."</p>

    <p>Spain was to Elizabethan Englishmen what Germany is
    to-day.</p>

    <p>"I would venture to say one word here to my Irish fellow
    countrymen of all political persuasions. If they imagine they
    can stand politically or economically while Britain falls they
    are woefully mistaken. The British fleet is their one shield.
    It if be broken Ireland will go down. They may well throw
    themselves heartily into the common defence, for no sword can
    transfix England without the point reaching behind her." (Sir
    Arthur Conan Doyle, in the <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, Feb.,
    1913, "Great Britain and the Next War.")</p>

    <p>The voice is a very old one, and the bogey has done duty for
    a long time in Ireland. When, to-day, it is from Germany that
    freedom may be feared, Ireland is warned against the German.
    When, three hundred years ago the beacon of hope shone on the
    coast of Spain, it was the Spaniards who were the bad people of
    history.</p>

    <p>Fray Mattheo de Oviedo, who had been sent to Ireland as
    Archbishop, wrote to King Philip III from O'Neill's stronghold,
    Dungannon, on June 24, 1600. We might be listening to the voice
    of the <i>Fortnightly Review</i> of yesterday. "The English are
    making <span class="pagenum"><a name="page57"
       id="page57"></a>[pg 57]</span> great efforts to bring about
       a peace, offering excellent terms, and for this purpose the
       Viceroy sent messengers twice to O'Neill, saying among other
       things, that Your Majesty is making peace with the Queen,
       and that his condition will be hopeless. At other times he
       says that no greater misfortune could happen to the country
       than to bring Spaniards into it, because they are haughty
       and vicious and they would destroy and ruin the country."
       The Irish princes were no fools. "To all this they reply
       most honourably that they will hold out as long as they have
       one soldier or there remains a cow to eat."</p>

    <p>Hugh O'Neill saw clearly that all compromise between Ireland
    and England was futile, and that the way of escape was by
    complete separation and lay only through Europe. He again and
    again begged the Spanish King to sever Ireland and erect it
    into an allied State. He offered the crown of Ireland to a
    Spanish prince, just as three centuries earlier another and a
    great O'Neill offered the crown of Ireland to Edward Bruce in
    1315.</p>

    <p>The coming of the Bruce saved Gaelic Ireland for three
    centuries. Had Philip of Spain sent his son as King to Ireland,
    her fate had been settled then instead of remaining three
    centuries later to still confront European statesmanship with
    an unsolved problem.</p>

    <p>In many letters addressed by the Irish leaders to Philip II
    and Philip III we find the constantly recurring note of warning
    that to leave England in possession of Ireland meant the
    downfall of Spain. The Irish princes knew that in fighting
    England they were in truth fighting the battle of European
    civilization.</p>

    <p>Writing to Philip II from Lifford, on May 16th, 1596,
    O'Neill and O'Donnell drew the King's attention to the cause of
    Ireland as the cause of Europe, and in the name of Ireland
    offered the crown to a Spanish prince. "But inasmuch as we have
    felt to our great and indescribably harm the evil doings and
    crimes of those whom the Queen of England is in the habit of
    sending amongst us, we beg and beseech Your Majesty to send
    someone well known to you and perfectly fit to be the King of
    this island, for his own welfare, ours, and that of the
    Christian State (Christendom)."</p>

    <p>They asked for a prince "who will not be unwilling to rule
    over and live amongst us and to direct and guide our nation,
    well and wisely." They pointed out how "he will obtain much
    advantage and glory by so doing," and finally they begged
    "would that Your Majesty would appoint the Archduke of Austria,
    now Governor of Flanders, a famous man and worthy of all
    praise, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page58"
       id="page58"></a>[pg 58]</span> than whom none would be more
       acceptable." (The original is in Latin and in the archives
       of Simancas.)</p>

    <p>No more statesmanlike appeal was ever made from Ireland; and
    had the Archduke of Austria assumed the crown of Ireland in
    1596, "now or never" would indeed have become "now and
    forever." Had Philip II carried out his often repeated promises
    of sending aid to that country the fate of his own kingdom must
    have been a very different one.</p>

    <p>"I wish it were possible for me, by word of mouth, to show
    the importance of this undertaking and the great service that
    would be rendered thereby to God and His Church, and <i>the
    great advantage it would be to the service of Your Majesty and
    the peace of Your States to attack the enemy here</i>."</p>

    <p>So wrote in 1600 to Philip II, the Archbishop of Dublin,
    already quoted, Mattheo de Oviedo.</p>

    <p>This prelate had been specially sent to Ireland "to see and
    understand the state of the country misrepresented by English
    emissaries at foreign courts."</p>

    <p>The wrath of Elizabeth against O'Neill was largely due to
    his keeping in touch with the continent, whereby the lies of
    her agents abroad were turned to her own ridicule. To Essex,
    her Viceroy, she wrote: "Tyrone hath blazed in foreign parts
    the defeat of regiments, the death of captains, and loss of men
    of quality in every quarter."</p>

    <p>O'Neill not only for years beat her generals in the field,
    her beat herself and her councillors at their own game. To
    Essex, in an ecstacy of rage at the loss of the last great army
    sent, she wrote (September 17th, 1599): "To trust this traitor
    upon oath is to trust the devil upon his religion. Only this we
    are sure (for we see it in effect), that you have prospered so
    ill for us by your warfare, as we cannot but be very jealous
    lest we should be as well overtaken by the treaty."</p>

    <p>(Essex wished to bring O'Neill in by a treaty which, while
    ostensibly conceding the terms of the Irish prince was to allow
    the Queen time to carry out her purpose.)</p>

    <p>The Irish princes knew Elizabeth and her Ministers, as well
    as she read Essex. "Believe no news from Ireland of any
    agreement in this country," they had written to Philip II in
    1597, "great offers have been made by the Queen of England, but
    we will not break our word and promise to your." In a letter
    written a year earlier (Oct. 18, 1596), replying to the special
    envoy sent by the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page59"
       id="page59"></a>[pg 59]</span> king, they said: "Since the
       former envoys left us we have used every means in our power,
       as we promised we should do, to gain time and
       procrastination from one day to another. But how could we
       impose on so clever an enemy so skilled in every kind of
       cunning and cheating if we did not use much dissimulation,
       and especially if we did not pretend we were anxious for
       peace? We will keep firm and unshaken the promises which we
       made to Your Majesty with our last breath; if we do not we
       shall incur at once the wrath of God and the contempt of
       men."</p>

    <p>How faithfully they kept those promises and how the Spanish
    King failed in his, their fate and the bitter ruin of their
    country shows. That men fighting for Ireland had to meet
    Elizabeth and her statesmen with something of her own cunning
    is made very clear to anyone reading the State papers in
    Ireland.</p>

    <p>Essex, in one of his "answers" wrote: "I advise Her Majesty
    to allow me, at my return to Dublin, to conclude this treaty,
    yielding some of their grants in the present; and when Her
    Majesty has made secret preparations to enable me to prosecute,
    I will find quarrels enough to break and give them a deadly
    blow."</p>

    <p>The Irish, however, failed in this contest. They were not
    sufficiently good liars, and lacked the higher flights of
    villainy necessary to sustain the encounter. The essential
    English way in Tudor days, and much later, for administering a
    deadly blow to an Irish patriot was "assassination." Poison
    frequently took the place of the knife, and was often
    administered wrapped in a leaf of the British Bible. A certain
    Atkinson, knowing the religious nature of Cecil, the Queen's
    Prime Minister, the founder of a long line of statesmen,
    foremost as champions of Church and Book, suggested the getting
    rid of O'Neill by some "poisoned Hosts." This proposal to use
    the Blessed Sacrament as a veritable Last Supper for the last
    great Irish chief remains on record, was endorsed by Cecil.</p>

    <p>Another Briton, named Annyas, was charged to poison "the
    most dangerous and open rebel in Munster," Florence MacCarthy
    More, the great MacCarthy. Elizabeth's Prime Minister piously
    endorsed the deed&mdash;"though his soul never had the thought
    to consent to the poisoning of a dog, much less a Christian
    ."</p>

    <p>To Carew, the President of Munster, Cecil wrote enjoining
    the assassination of the young Earl of Desmond, then "in the
    keeping of Carew": "Whatever you do to abridge him out of
    Providence shall never be imputed to you for a fault, but
    exceedingly commended by the Queen." After this, we are not
    surprised to learn <span class="pagenum"><a name="page60"
       id="page60"></a>[pg 60]</span> that in her instructions to
       Mountjoy, the successor of Essex, the Queen recommended "to
       his special care to preserve the true exercise of religion
       among her loving subjects." As O'Neill was still in the
       field with a large army, she prudently pointed out, however,
       that the time "did not permit that he should intermeddle by
       any severity or violence in matters of religion until her
       power was better established there to countenance his
       action." That the character of their adversary was
       faithfully appreciated by contemporary Irish opinion stands
       plain in a letter written by James Fitzthomas, nephew of the
       great Earl Gerald of Desmond, to Philip II. "The government
       of the English is such as Pharaoh himself never used the
       like; for they content not themselves with all temporal
       prosperity, but by cruelty desire our blood and perpetual
       destruction to blot out the whole remembrance of our
       posterity&mdash;for that Nero, in his time, was far inferior
       to that Queen in cruelty."</p>

    <p>The Irish chiefs well sustained their part in meeting this
    combination of power and perfidy, and merited, on the highest
    grounds of policy the help so often promised by the King of
    Spain. They showed him not only by their valour on the field
    but by their sagacious council how great a part was reserved
    for Ireland in the affairs of Europe if he would but profit
    from it and do his part.</p>

    <p>In this the Spanish King failed. Philip II had died in 1598,
    too immersed in religious trials to see that the centre of his
    griefs was pivoted on the possession of Ireland by the female
    Nero. With his son and successor communication was maintained
    and in a letter of Philip III to O'Neill, dated from Madrid,
    Dec. 24th, 1599, we read: "Noble and well beloved I have
    already written a joint letter to you and your relative
    O'Donnell, in which I replied to a letter of both of you. By
    this, which I now write to you personally I wish to let you
    know my good will towards you, and I mean to prove it, not only
    by word, but by deed." That promise was not fulfilled, or so
    inadequately fulfilled that the help, when it came, was
    insufficient to meet the needs of the case.</p>

    <p>History tells us what the sad consequences were to the cause
    of civilisation in Ireland, from the failure of the Spanish
    King to realize the greatness of his responsibilities. But the
    evil struck deeper than to Ireland alone. Europe lost more than
    her historians have yet realised from the weakness of purpose
    that let Ireland go down transfixed by the sword of
    Elizabeth.</p>

    <p>Had the fate of Europe been then controlled by a
    Hohenzollern, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page61"
       id="page61"></a>[pg 61]</span> instead of by a Spanish
       Hapsburg, how different might have been the future of the
       world!</p>

    <p>Although Europe had forgotten Ireland, Ireland had never
    forgotten Europe. Natural outpost and sentinel of that
    continent in the West for three-hundred years now gagged and
    bound, since the flight to Rome of her last native Princes, she
    stands to-day as in the days of Philip III, if an outcast from
    European civilization non the less rejecting the insular
    tradition of England, as she has rejected her insular Church.
    And now once more in her career she turns to the greatest of
    European Sovereigns, to win his eyes to the oldest, and
    certainly the most faithful of European peoples. Ireland
    already has given and owes much to Germany.</p>

    <p>In the dark ages intercourse between the Celtic people of
    the West and the Rhinelands and Bavaria was close and long
    sustained. Irish monasteries flourished in the heart of
    Germany, and German architecture gave its note possibly to some
    of the fairest cathedral churches in Ireland.</p>

    <p>Clonfert and Cashel are, perhaps amongst the most
    conspicuous examples of the influence of that old-time
    intercourse with Germany. To-day, when little of her past
    remains to venerate, her ancient language on what seemed its
    bed of death owes much of its present day revival to German
    scholarship and culture. Probably the foremost Gaelic scholar
    of the day is the occupant of the Chair of Celtic at Berlin
    University, and Ireland recognises with a gratitude she is not
    easily able to express, all that her ancient literature owes to
    the genius and loving intellect of Dr. Kuno Meyer.</p>

    <p>The name of Ireland may be known on the Bourses or in the
    Chancelleries of Europe; it is not without interest, even fame,
    in the centres of German academical culture. But that the
    German State may also be interested in the political fate of
    Ireland is believed by the present writer.</p>

    <p>Maurice Fitzgerald, the outlawed claimant to the Earldom of
    Desmond, wrote to Philip II, from Lisbon on September 4th,
    1593:</p>

    <p>"We have thought it right to implore your Majesty to send
    the aid you will think fit and with it to send us (the Irish
    refugees in the Peninsula) to defend and uphold the same
    undertaking; for we hope, with God's help Your Majesty will be
    victorious and conquer and hold as your own the kingdom of
    Ireland.&mdash;We trust in God that Your Majesty and the
    Council will weigh well <span class="pagenum"><a name="page62"
       id="page62"></a>[pg 62]</span> the advantages that will
       ensue to Christendom from this enterprise&mdash;since the
       opportunity is so good and the cause so just and weighty,
       and the undertaking so easily completed."</p>

    <p>The history of human freedom is written in letters of blood.
    It is the law of God. No people who clutch to safety, who shun
    death are worthy of freedom.</p>

    <p>The dead who die for Ireland are the only live men in a free
    Ireland. The rest are cattle. Freedom is kept alive in man's
    blood only by shedding of that blood. It was not an act of a
    foreign Parliament they were seeking, those splendid "scorners
    of death," the lads and young men of Mayo, who awaited with a
    fearless joy the advance of the English army fresh from the
    defeat of Humbert in 1798. Then, if ever, Irishmen might have
    run from a victorious and pitiless enemy who, having captured
    the French General and murdered in cold blood the seven hundred
    Killala peasants who were with his colours, were now come to
    Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the last stronghold of
    Irish rebellion.</p>

    <p>The ill-led and half armed peasants, the last Irishmen in
    Ireland to stand the pitched fight for their country's freedom,
    went to meet the army of England, as the Protestant Bishop, who
    saw them, says:&mdash;"running upon death with as little
    appearance of reflection or concern as if they were hastening
    to a show."</p>

    <p>The late Queen Victoria, in one of her letters to her uncle,
    the King of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abortive rising of
    fifty years later in 1848:</p>

    <p>"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland,
    and I think it is very likely to go off without any contest,
    which people (and I think rightly) rather regret. The Irish
    should receive <i>a good lesson or they will begin again</i>."
    (Page 223, Vol. II, Queen Victoria's letters.) Her Majesty was
    profoundly right. Ireland needed that lesson in 1848, as she
    needs it still more to-day. Had Irishmen died in 1848 as they
    did in 1798 Ireland would be to-day fifty years nearer to
    freedom. It is because a century has passed since Europe saw
    Ireland willing to die that to-day Europe has forgotten that
    she lives.</p>

    <p>As I began this essay with a remark of Charles Lever on
    Germany so shall end it here with a remark of Lever on his own
    country, Ireland.</p>

    <p>In a letter to a friend in Dublin, he thus put the epitaph
    of Europe on the grave of a generation who believed that "no
    human <span class="pagenum"><a name="page63"
       id="page63"></a>[pg 63]</span> cause was worth the shedding
       one drop of human blood."</p>

    <p>"As to Ireland all foreign sympathy is over owing to the
    late cowardice and poltroonery of the patriots. <i>Even
    Italians can fight</i>" (Letter of C. Lever from Florence,
    August 19th, 1848).</p>

    <p>It is only the truth that wounds. It is that reproach that
    has cursed Ireland for a century.</p>

    <p>Sedition, the natural garment for an Irishman to wear, has
    been for a hundred years a bloodless sedition. It is this fiery
    shirt of Nessus that has driven our strong men mad. How to shed
    our blood with honour, how to give our lives for
    Ireland&mdash;that has been, that is the problem of Irish
    nationality.</p>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter VII</h3>

    <h2>THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS</h2>

    <p>It would be idle to attempt to forecast the details of a
    struggle between Great Britain and Germany. That is a task that
    belongs to the War Department of the two States. I have
    assigned myself merely to point out that such a struggle is
    inevitable, and to indicate what I believe to be the supreme
    factors in the conflict, and how one of these, Ireland, and
    that undoubtedly the most important factor, has been overlooked
    by practically every predecessor of Germany in the effort to
    make good at sea. The Spaniards in Elizabeth's reign, the
    French of Louis XIV and of the Directory took some steps, it is
    true, to challenge England's control of Ireland, but instead of
    concentrating their strength upon that line of attack they were
    content to dissipate it upon isolated expeditions and never
    once to push home the assault on the one point that was
    obviously the key to the enemy's whole position. At any period
    during that last three centuries, with Ireland gone, England
    was, if not actually at the mercy of her assailants, certainly
    reduced to impotency beyond her own shores. But while England
    knew the value to herself of Ireland, she appreciated to the
    full the fact that this profitable juxtaposition lay on her
    right side hidden from the eyes of Europe.</p>

    <p>"Will anyone assert," said Gladstone, "that we would have
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page64"
       id="page64"></a>[pg 64]</span> dared to treat Ireland as we
       have done had she lain, not between us and the ocean, but
       between us and the continent?" And while the bulk of
       England, swollen to enormous dimensions by the gains she
       drew from Ireland interposed between her victim and Europe,
       her continental adversaries were themselves the victims of
       that strange mental disease psychologists term the
       collective illusion. All the world saw that which in fact
       did not exist. The greatness of England as they beheld it,
       imposing, powerful, and triumphant, existed not on the rocky
       base they believed they saw, but on the object, sacked,
       impoverished, and bled, they never saw. And so it is to-day.
       The British Empire is the great illusion. Resembling in much
       the Holy Roman Empire it is not British, it is not an
       Empire, and assuredly it is not holy. It lives on the
       life-blood and sufferings of some, on the suffrance and
       mutual jealousy of others, and on the fixed illusion of all.
       Rather is it a great Mendicity Institute. England now,
       instead of "robbing from Pole to Pole," as John Mitchel once
       defined her activities, goes begging from Pole to Pole that
       all and every one shall give her a helping hand to keep the
       plunder. Chins, Goorkhas, Sikhs, Malays, Irish, Chinese,
       South African Dutch, Australasians, Maoris, Canadians,
       Japanese, and finally "Uncle Sam"&mdash;these are the main
       components that when skilfully mixed from London, furnish
       the colouring material for the world-wide canvas. If we take
       away India, Egypt and the other coloured races the white
       population that remains is greatly inferior to the
       population of Germany, and instead of being a compact,
       indivisible whole, consists of a number of widely scattered
       and separated communities, each with separate and absorbing
       problems of its own, and more than one of them British
       neither in race, speech, nor affection. Moreover if we turn
       to the coloured races we find that the great mass of the
       subjects of this Empire have less rights within it than they
       possess outside its boundaries, and occupy there a lower
       status than that accorded to most foreigners.</p>

    <p>The people of India far out number all other citizens of the
    British Empire put together, and yet we find the British
    Indians resident in Canada, to take but one instance,
    petitioning the Imperial Government in 1910 for as favourable
    terms of entry into that British possession as the Japanese
    enjoyed.</p>

    <p>They pointed out that a Japanese could enter Canada on
    showing that he held from six pounds to ten pounds, but that no
    British Indian could land unless he had forty pounds and had
    come direct <span class="pagenum"><a name="page65"
       id="page65"></a>[pg 65]</span> from India,&mdash;a physical
       impossibility, since no direct communication exists. But
       they went further, for they showed that their "citizenship"
       of the British Empire entailed penalties that no foreign
       state anywhere imposed upon them.</p>

    <p>"We appeal," they said, "and most forcibly bring to your
    notice that no such discriminating laws are existing against us
    in foreign countries like the United States of America,
    Germany, Japan, and Africa, to whom we do not owe any
    allegiance whatsoever."</p>

    <p>So that outside its white or European races it is clear the
    Empire has no general or equal citizenship, and that, far from
    being one, it is more divided racially against itself than are
    even opposing Asiatic and European nations which have the good
    fortune not to be united in a common, imperial bond.</p>

    <p>The total white population of this incongruous mass in 1911
    consisted of some 59,000,000 human beings made up of various
    national and racial strains, as against 66,000,000 of white men
    in the German Empire the vast majority of them of German blood.
    And while the latter form a disciplined, self-contained, and
    self-supporting and self-defending whole, the former are
    swelled by Irish, French-Canadians, and Dutch South Africans
    who, according to Sir R. Edgcumbe, must be reckoned as
    "coloured."</p>

    <p>It is one thing to paint the map red, but you must be sure
    that your colours are fast and that the stock of paints wont
    run out. England, apart from her own perplexities is now faced
    with this prospect. Great Britain can no longer count on
    Ireland, that most prolific source of supply of her army, navy,
    and industrial efforts during the last century, while she is
    faced with a declining birth-rate, due largely, be it noted, to
    the diminished influx of the Irish, a more prolific and virile
    race. While her internal powers of reproduction are failing,
    her ability to keep those already born is diminishing still
    more rapidly. Emigration threatens to remove the surplus of
    births over deaths.</p>

    <p>As long as it was only the population of Ireland that fell
    (8,500,000 in 1846 to 4,370,000 in 1911), Great Britain was not
    merely untroubled but actually rejoiced at a decrease in
    numbers that made the Irish more manageable, and yet just
    sufficiently starvable to supply her with a goodly surplus for
    army, navy, and industrial expansion in Great Britain. Now that
    the Irish are gone with a vengeance it is being perceived that
    they did not take their vengeance with them and that the very
    industrial expansion they
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page66"
       id="page66"></a>[pg 66]</span> built up from their starving
       bodies and naked limbs contains within itself the seeds of a
       great retribution.</p>

    <p>"Since Free Trade has ruined our agriculture, our army has
    become composed of starving slum dwellers who, according to the
    German notion are better at shouting than at fighting. German
    generals have pointed out that in the South African war our
    regular and auxiliary troops often raised the white flag and
    surrendered, without necessity, sometimes to a few Boers, and
    they may do the same to a German invading force. Free Trade
    which "benefits the consumer" and the capitalist has,
    unfortunately, through the destruction of our agriculture and
    through forcing practically the whole population of Great
    Britain into the towns, destroyed the manhood of the nation."
    (Modern Germany page 251, by J. Ellis Barker, 1907). An army of
    slum dwellers is a poor base on which to build the structure of
    a perpetual world dominion.</p>

    <p>While the navy shows an imposing output of new battleships
    and cruisers for 1913, the record, we are told, of all warship
    construction in the world, it takes blood as well as iron to
    cement empires. Battleships may become so much floating scrap
    iron (like the Russian fleet at Tsushima), if the men behind
    the guns lack the right stamina and education.</p>

    <p>We learn, too, that it is not only the slum dwellers who are
    failing, but that to meet the shortage of officers a large
    number of transfers from the merchant marine to the Royal Navy
    are being sanctioned. To this must be added the call of the
    Great Dominions for men and officers to man their local fleets.
    As the vital resources of England become more and more
    inadequate to meet the menace of German naval and moral
    strength, she turns her eyes to Ireland, and we learn from the
    London <i>Daily Telegraph</i> that Mr. Churchill's scheme of
    recruiting at Queenstown may furnish "matter for
    congratulation, as Irish boys make excellent bluejackets happy
    of disposition, amenable to discipline, and extremely quick and
    handy."</p>

    <p>As I can recall an article in this same journal, written
    during the course of the Boer War, in which Ireland was likened
    to a "serpent whose head must be crushed beneath the heel," the
    <i>Daily Telegraph's</i> praise to-day of the Irish disposition
    should leave Irish boys profoundly unmoved&mdash;and still
    ashore.</p>

    <p>There is yet another aspect of the growing stream of British
    emigration. "Death removes the feeble, emigration removes the
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page67"
       id="page67"></a>[pg 67]</span> strong. Canada, New Zealand,
       Australia, and South Africa, have no use for the sick and
       palsied, or of those incapable of work through age or youth.
       They want the workers and they get them. Those who have left
       the United Kingdom during 1912 are not the scum of our
       islands, but the very pick. And they leave behind, for our
       politicians to grapple with, a greater proportion of
       females, of children and of disabled than ever before."
       (<i>London Magazine</i>!)</p>

    <p>The excess of females over males, already so noteworthy a
    feature of England's decay, becomes each year more accentuated
    and doubtless accounts for the strenuous efforts now being made
    to entrap Irish boys into the British army and navy.</p>

    <p>If we compare the figures of Germany and Great Britain, and
    then contrast them with those of Ireland, we shall see, at a
    glance, how low England is sinking, and how vitally necessary
    it is for her to redress the balance of her own excess of
    "militants" over males by kidnapping Irish youths into her
    emasculated services and by fomenting French and Russian
    enmities against the fruitful German people.</p>

    <p>Germany 1910, males, 32,031,967; females, 32,871,456; total,
    64,925,993. Excess of females, 739,489.</p>

    <p>Great Britain, 1911:</p>

    <p>England and Wales&mdash;Males, 17,448,476; females,
    18,626,793; total, 36,075,269. Excess of females,
    1,178,317.</p>

    <p>Scotland&mdash;Males, 2,307,603; females, 2,251,842; total,
    4,759,445. Excess of females, 144,239.</p>

    <p>Total for Great Britain, 40,834,714. Excess of females,
    1,322,556.</p>

    <p>Thus on a population much less than two thirds that of
    Germany Great Britain has almost twice as many females in
    excess over males as Germany has, and this disproportion of
    sexes tends yearly to increase. We read in every fresh return
    of emigration that it is men and not women who are leaving
    England and Scotland. That Irish emigration, appalling as its
    ravages have been since 1846, is still maintained on a
    naturally healthier basis the sex returns for 1911 make clear.
    The figures for Ireland at the census were as follows:</p>

    <p>Ireland&mdash;Males, 2,186,802; females, 2,195,147; total,
    4,381,949. Excess of females, 8,346.</p>

    <p>Ireland, it is seen, can still spare 100,000 or 150,000
    males for the British armed forces and be in no unhealthier sex
    plight than Scotland or England is in. It is to get this
    surplus of stout Irish brawn
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page68"
       id="page68"></a>[pg 68]</span> and muscle that Mr. Churchill
       and the British War Office are now touting in Ireland.</p>

    <p>I take the following Government advertisement from the Cork
    <i>Evening Echo</i> (of March, 1913), in illustration:</p>

    <p>"Notice&mdash;Any person that brings a recruit for the
    Regular or Special Reserve Branches of the Army to the
    Recruiting Officer at Victoria Barracks, Cork, will be paid the
    money reward allowed for each recruit which ranges from 1/6 to
    5/- each."</p>

    <p>From whatever point of view we survey it we shall find that
    England's Empire at bottom rests upon Ireland to make good
    British deficiencies. The Dominions are far off, and while they
    may give battleships they take men. Ireland is close at
    hand&mdash;she gives all and takes nothing. Men, mind, food and
    money&mdash;all these she has offered through the centuries,
    and it is upon these and the unrestricted drain of these four
    things from that rich mine of human fertility and wealth that
    the British Empire has been founded and maintained. To secure
    to-day the goodwill and active co-operation of the Irish race
    abroad as well as in Ireland, and through that goodwill to
    secure the alliance and support of the United States has become
    the guiding purpose of British statesmanship.</p>

    <p>The Home Rule Bill of the present Liberal Government is
    merely the petty party expression of what all English statesmen
    recognize as a national need. Were the present Liberal
    Government thrown out to-morrow their Unionist successors would
    hasten to bind Ireland (and America) to them by a measure that,
    if necessary, would go much further. Every Unionist knows this.
    Ireland is always the key to the situation.</p>

    <p>I will quote two pronouncements, one English and one
    American, to show that Home Rule has now become an imperial
    necessity for England.</p>

    <p>Speaking in the House of Lords on the Home Rule Bill, Earl
    Grey, the late Governor-General of Canada, said on January
    27th, 1913:</p>

    <p>"In the interests of the Empire I feel very strongly that it
    is imperative that the Irish question should be settled on
    lines which will satisfy the sentiment of the over-sea
    democracies, both in our self-governing colonies and in the
    United States. Everyone, I think will agree that it is most
    important and in the highest interests of the empire that there
    should be the friendliest feelings of generous affection and
    goodwill, not only between the self-governing
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page69"
       id="page69"></a>[pg 69]</span> Dominions and the Motherland,
       but also between America and England.... I need not
       elaborate this point. We are all agreed upon it. A heavy
       shadow at present exists, and it arises from our treatment
       of Ireland.... If this be so is it not our duty to remove
       the obstacle that prevents that relationship with America
       from being that which we all desire?"</p>

    <p>The American utterance came from one equally representative
    of American Imperial interests. It is that of Mr. Roosevelt,
    published in the <i>Irish World</i> of New York, Feb. 8th,
    1913.</p>

    <p>"I feel that the enactment into law of this measure ... bids
    fair to establish goodwill among the English-speaking peoples.
    This has been prevented more than by any other one thing by
    this unhappy feud that has raged for centuries, and the
    settlement of which, I most earnestly hope, and believe, will
    be a powerful contribution to the peace of the world, based on
    international justice and goodwill. I earnestly feel that the
    measure is as much in the interests of Great Britain as of
    Ireland."</p>

    <p>Did we judge of Ireland only by many of the public
    utterances made in her name, then, indeed might we despair of a
    people who having suffered so much and so valiantly resisted
    for so many centuries were now to be won to their oppressor's
    side, by, perhaps, the most barefaced act of bribery ever
    attempted by a Government against a people.</p>

    <p>"Injured nations cannot so entirely forgive their enemies
    without losing something of their virility, and it grates upon
    me to hear leader after leader of the Parliamentary Party
    declaring without shame that Home Rule when it is won for
    Ireland is to be used for a new weapon of offence in England's
    hands against the freedom of the world elsewhere."</p>

    <p>Did the Irish Parliamentary Party indeed represent Ireland
    in this, Mr. Wilfred Blunt's noble protest in his recent work,
    <i>The Land War in Ireland</i>, would stand for the
    contemptuous impeachment, not of a political party but of a
    nation.</p>

    <p>Mr. Redmond in his latest speech shows how truly Mr. Blunt
    has depicted his party's aim; but to the credit of Ireland it
    is to be recorded that Mr. Redmond had to choose not Ireland,
    but England for its delivery. Speaking at St. Patrick's Day
    dinner in London on March 17th, 1913, Mr. Redmond, to a
    non-Irish audience, thus hailed the future part his country is
    to play under the restoration of what he describes as a
    "National Parliament."</p>

    <p>"We will, under Home Rule, devote our attention to
    education, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page70"
       id="page70"></a>[pg 70]</span> reform of the Poor Law, and
       questions of that kind which are purely domestic, which are,
       if you like, hum-drum Irish questions, and the only way in
       which we will attempt to interfere in any Imperial question
       will be by our representatives on the floor of the Imperial
       Parliament in Westminster doing everything in our power to
       increase the strength and the glory of what will then be our
       empire at long last; and by sending in support of the empire
       the strong arms and brave hearts of Irish soldiers and Irish
       sailors, to maintain the traditions of Irish valour in every
       part of the world. That is our ambition."</p>

    <p>Were this indeed the ambition of Ireland, did this represent
    the true feeling of Irishmen towards England, and the Empire of
    England, then Home Rule, on such terms, would be a curse and a
    crime. Thierry, the French historian, is a truer exponent of
    the passionate aspirations of the Irish heart than anyone who
    to-day would seek to represent Ireland as willing to sell her
    soul no less than the strong arms and brave hearts of her sons
    in an unholy cause.</p>

    <p>".... For notwithstanding the mixture of races, the
    intercommunion of every kind brought about by the course of
    centuries, hatred of the English Government still subsists as a
    native passion in the mass of the Irish nation. Ever since the
    hour of invasion this race of men has invariably desired that
    which their conquerors did not desire, detested that which they
    liked, and liked that which they detested ... This indomitable
    persistency, this faculty of preserving through centuries of
    misery the remembrance of lost liberty, and of never despairing
    of a cause always defeated, always fatal to those who dared to
    defend it, is perhaps the strangest and noblest example ever
    given by any nation." (<i>Histoire De La Conquete De
    L'Angleterre Par Les Normands</i>, Paris edition, 1846. London,
    1891.)</p>

    <p>The French writer here saw deeper and spoke truer than many
    who seek to-day not to reveal the Irish heart, whose deep
    purpose they have forgotten, but barter its life-blood for a
    concession that could be won to-morrow by half that blood if
    shed at home, thus offered without warrant "as a new weapon of
    offence to England's hands against the freedom of the world
    elsewhere."</p>

    <p>The Irishman, who in the belief that Home Rule has come or
    that any measure of Home Rule the London Parliament will offer
    can be a substitute for his country's freedom, joins the
    British army or navy is a voluntary traitor to his country.
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page71"
       id="page71"></a>[pg 71]</span> Almost everything that
       Ireland produces, or consumes, must all go out or come
       solely through England and on payment of a transit and
       shipping tax to English trade.</p>

    <p>The London press has lately waxed indignant over Servia
    denied by Austria a port on the Adriatic, and we have been told
    a Servia without a port is a Servia held in "economic slavery,"
    and that her independence is illusory unless she have free
    outlet to the sea. But what of Ireland? With not one, but forty
    ports, the finest in all Western Europe, they lie idle and
    empty. With over 1,000 miles of seaboard, facing the West and
    holding the seaway between Europe and America, Ireland, in the
    grip of England, has been reduced to an economic slavery that
    has no parallel in civilization.</p>

    <p>And it is to this island, to this people that the appeal is
    now made that we should distrust the Germans and aid our
    enslavers. Better far, were that the only outcome, the fate of
    Alsace-Lorraine (who got their Home Rule Parliament years ago)
    than the "friendship" of England. We have survived the open
    hate, the prolonged enslavement, the secular robbery of England
    and now the England smiles and offers us with one hand Home
    Rule to take it away with the other, are we going to forget the
    experience of our forefathers? A Connacht proverb of the Middle
    Ages should come back to us&mdash;"Three things for a man to
    avoid; the heels of a horse, the horns of a bull; and the smile
    of an Englishman."</p>

    <p>That Ireland must be involved in any war that Great Britain
    undertakes goes without saying; but that we should willingly
    throw ourselves into the fray on the wrong side to avert a
    British defeat, is the counsel of traitors offered to
    fools.</p>

    <p>We must see to it that what Thierry wrote of our fathers is
    not shamefully belied by their sons. Our "indomitable
    persistency" has up to this excelled and subdued the unvarying
    will applied to one unvarying purpose of those who, by dint of
    that quality, have elsewhere subjugated the universe. We who
    have preserved through centuries of misery, the remembrance of
    lost liberty, are not now going to merge our unconquered souls
    in the base body of our oppressor.</p>

    <p>One of the few Liberal statesmen England has produced,
    certainly the only Liberal politician she has ever produced,
    the late Mr. Gladstone, compared the union between Great
    Britain and Ireland to "the union between the mangled corpse of
    Hector and the headlong chariot of Achilles." (1890.)</p>

    <p>But, while I cannot admit that England is an Achilles, save,
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page72"
       id="page72"></a>[pg 72]</span> perhaps, that she may be
       wounded like him in the heel, I will not admit, I will not
       own that Ireland, however mangled, however "the plowers have
       ploughed upon her back and made long furrows," is in truth
       dead, is indeed a corpse. No; there is a juster analogy, and
       one given us by the only Englishman who was in every clime,
       and in every circumstance a Liberal; one who died fighting
       in the cause of liberty, even as in life he sang it. Byron
       denounced the union between England and Ireland as "the
       union of the shark with its prey."</p>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter VIII</h3>

    <h2>IRELAND, GERMANY AND THE NEXT WAR</h2>

    <p>In the February, 1913, <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, Sir Arthur
    Conan Doyle at the end of an article, "Great Britain and the
    Next War," thus appeals to Ireland to recognize that her
    interests are one with those of Great Britain in the eventual
    defeat of the latter:</p>

    <p>"I would venture to say one word here to my Irish
    fellow-countrymen of all political persuasions. If they imagine
    that they can stand politically or economically while Britain
    falls they are woefully mistaken. The British fleet is their
    one shield. If it be broken Ireland will go down. They may well
    throw themselves heartily into the common defence, for no sword
    can transfix England without the point reaching Ireland behind
    her...."</p>

    <p>I propose to briefly show that Ireland, far from sharing the
    calamities that must necessarily fall on Great Britain from
    defeat by a great power, might conceivably thereby emerge into
    a position of much prosperity.</p>

    <p>I will agree with Sir A. Conan Doyle up to this&mdash;that
    the defeat of Great Britain by Germany must be the cause of a
    momentous change to Ireland: but I differ from him in believing
    that that change must necessarily be disastrous to Ireland. On
    the contrary, I believe that the defeat of Great Britain by
    Germany might conceivably (save in one possible condition)
    result in great gain to Ireland.</p>

    <p>The conclusion that Ireland must suffer all the disasters
    and eventual losses defeat would entail on Great Britain is
    based on what may be termed the fundamental maxim that has
    governed British dealings with Ireland throughout at least
    three centuries. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page73"
       id="page73"></a>[pg 73]</span> That maxim may be given in
       the phrase, "Separation is unthinkable." Englishmen have
       come to invincibly believe that no matter what they may do
       or what may betide them, Ireland must inseparably be theirs,
       linked to them as surely as Wales or Scotland, and forming
       an eternal and integral part of a whole whose fate is
       indissolubly in their hands. While Great Britain, they
       admit, might well live apart (and happily) from an Ireland
       safely "sunk under the sea" they have never conceived of an
       Ireland, still afloat, that could possibly exist, apart from
       Great Britain. Sometimes, as a sort of bogey, they hold out
       to Ireland the fate that would be hers if, England defeated,
       somebody else should "take" her. For it is a necessary
       corollary to the fundamental maxim already stated, that
       Ireland, if not owned by England, must necessarily be
       "owned" by someone else than her own inhabitants.</p>

    <p>The British view of the fate of Ireland in the event of
    British defeat may be stated as twofold. Either Ireland would
    remain after the war as she is to-day, tied to Great Britain,
    or she <i>might</i> be (this is not very seriously entertained)
    annexed by the victor. No other solution, I think, has ever
    been suggested. Let us first discuss No. I.</p>

    <p>This, the ordinary man in the street view, is that as
    Ireland would be as much a part and belonging to Great Britain
    after a war as before it, whatever the termination of that war
    might be, she could not fail to share the losses defeat must
    bring to a common realm. The partnership being indissoluble, if
    the credit of the house were damaged and its properties
    depreciated, all members of the firm must suffer. In this view,
    an Ireland weaker, poorer, and less recuperative than Great
    Britain, would stand to lose even more from a British defeat
    than the predominant partner itself. Let us at once admit that
    this view is correct. If on the condition of a great war
    Ireland were still to remain, as she is to-day, an integral
    portion of a defeated United Kingdom, it is plain she would
    suffer, and might be made to suffer possibly more even than
    fell to the share of Great Britain.</p>

    <p>But that is not the only ending defeat might bring to the
    two islands. We must proceed then to discuss No. 2, the
    alternative fate reserved for Ireland in the unlikely event of
    a great British overthrow. This is, that if the existing
    partnership were to be forcibly dissolved, by external shock,
    it would mean for Ireland "out of the frying pan into the
    fire." The idea here is that I have earlier designated as the
    "bogey man" idea. Germany, or the other victor in the great
    conflict, would proceed to "take" Ireland.
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page74"
       id="page74"></a>[pg 74]</span> An Ireland administered, say,
       by Prussians would soon bitterly regret the milder manners
       of the Anglo-Saxon and pine for the good old days of "doles"
       from Westminster. I know many Irishmen who admit that as
       between England and Germany they would prefer to remain in
       the hands of the former&mdash;on the principle that it is
       better to keep the devil you know than fall into the hands
       of a new devil.</p>

    <p>German rule, you are asked to believe, would be so bad, so
    stern, that under it Ireland, however much she might have
    suffered from England in the past, would soon yearn to be
    restored to the arms of her sorrowing sister. Assuming, for the
    sake of argument, that Germany "annexed" Ireland, is it at all
    clear that she would (or even could) injure Ireland more than
    Great Britain has done? To what purpose and with what end in
    view? "Innate brutality"&mdash;the Englishman
    replied&mdash;"the Prussian always ill-treats those he lays
    hands on&mdash;witness the poor Poles." Without entering into
    the Polish language question, or the Polish agrarian question,
    it is permissible for an Irishman to reply that nothing by
    Prussia in those respects has at all equalled English handling
    of the Irish language or England land dealings in Ireland. The
    Polish language still lives in Prussian Poland and much more
    vigorously than the Irish language survives in Ireland.</p>

    <p>But it is not necessary to obscure the issue by reference to
    the Prussian Polish problem. An Ireland annexed to the German
    Empire (supposing this to be internationally possible) as one
    of the fruits of a German victory over Great Britain would
    clearly be administered as a common possession of the German
    people, and not as a Prussian province. The analogy, if one can
    be set up in conditions so dissimilar, would lie not between
    Prussia and her Polish provinces, but between the German Empire
    and Alsace-Lorraine. What, then, would be the paramount object
    of Germany in her administration of an overseas Reichsland of
    such extraordinary geographical importance to her future as
    Ireland would be?</p>

    <p>Clearly not to impoverish and depress that new-won
    possession but to enhance its exceeding strategic importance by
    vigorous and wise administration, so as to make it the main
    counterpoise to any possible recovery of British maritime
    supremacy, so largely due as this was in the past to Great
    Britain's own possession of this island.</p>

    <p>A prosperous and flourishing Ireland, recognizing that her
    own <span class="pagenum"><a name="page75"
       id="page75"></a>[pg 75]</span> interests lie with those of
       the new Administration, would assuredly be the first and
       chief aim of German statesmanship.</p>

    <p>The very geographical situation of Ireland would alone
    ensure wise and able administration by her new rulers had
    Germany no other and special interest in advancing Irish
    well-being; for to rule from Hamburg and Berlin a remote island
    and a discontented people, with a highly discontented and
    separated Britain intervening, by methods of exploitation and
    centralization, would be a task beyond the capacity of German
    statecraft. German effort, then, would be plainly directed to
    creating an Ireland satisfied with the change, and fully
    determined to maintain it.</p>

    <p>And it might be remembered that Germany is possibly better
    equipped, intellectually and educationally, for the task of
    developing Ireland than even 20th century England. She has
    already faced a remarkable problem, and largely solved it in
    her forty years' administration of Alsace-Lorraine. There is a
    province torn by force from the bleeding side of France and
    alien in sentiment to her new masters to a degree that Ireland
    could not be to any changes of authority imposed upon her from
    without, has, within a short lifetime, doubled in prosperity
    and greatly increased her population, despite the open arms and
    insistent call of France, and despite a rule denounced from the
    first as hateful.</p>

    <p>However hateful, the Prussian has proved himself an able
    administrator and an honest and most capable instructor. In his
    strong hands Strasburg has expanded from being an ill-kept,
    pent-in French garrison town to a great and beautiful city.
    Already a local Parliament gives to the population a sense of
    autonomy, while the palace and constant presence of an Imperial
    prince affirms the fact that German Imperialism, far from
    engrossing and centralizing all the activities and powers of
    the empire in Berlin, recognizes that German nationality is
    large enough and great enough to admit of many capitals, many
    individualities, and many separate State growths within the
    sure compass of one great organism.</p>

    <p>That an Ireland severed by force of arms from the British
    Empire and annexed to the German Empire would be ill-governed
    by her new masters is inconceivable. On the contrary, the
    ablest brains in Germany, scientific, commercial, and
    financial, no less than military and strategic, would be
    devoted to the great task of making sure the conquest not only
    of an island but of the intelligence of a not unintelligent
    people, and by wisely developing so priceless a possession to
    reconcile its inhabitants through growing
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page76"
       id="page76"></a>[pg 76]</span> prosperity and an excellent
       administration, to so great a change in their political
       environment. Can it be said that England, even in her most
       lucid intervals, has brought to the Government of Ireland
       her best efforts, her most capable men, or her highest
       purpose? The answer may be given by Li Hung Chang, whose
       diary we have so lately read. Recording his interview with
       Mr. Gladstone, the Chinese statesman says: "He spoke about
       ... Ireland; and I was certain that he hoped to see that
       unhappy country governed better before he died. 'They have
       given their best to England,' he said, 'and in return have
       been given only England's worst.'" It is certain that
       Germany, once in possession of Ireland, would assuredly not
       give to that country only Germany's worst.</p>

    <p>In a score of ways Ireland would stand to gain from the
    change of direction, of purpose, of intention, and, I will add,
    of inspiration and capacity in her newly-imposed rulers.</p>

    <p>Whether she liked them or not, at the outset, would be
    beside the question. In this they would differ but little from
    those she had so long and wearily had measure of, and if they
    brought to their new task a new spirit and a new intellectual
    equipment Irishmen would not be slow to realize that if they
    themselves were never to rule their own country, they had, at
    least, found in their new masters something more than
    emigration agents.</p>

    <p>Moreover, to Germany there would be no "Irish question," no
    "haggard and haunting problem" to palsy her brain and miscredit
    her hand with its old tags and jibes and sordid impulses to
    deny the obvious.</p>

    <p>To Germany there would be only an English question. To
    prevent that from ever again imperilling her world future would
    be the first purpose of German overseas statesmanship. And it
    is clear that a wise and capable Irish Administration, designed
    to build up and strengthen from within and not to belittle and
    exploit from without, would be the sure and certain purpose of
    a victorious Germany.</p>

    <p>I have now outlined the two possible dispositions of Ireland
    that up to this British opinion admits as conceivable in die
    improbable event of a British defeat by Germany. Only these two
    contingencies are ever admitted. First that Ireland, sharing
    the common disaster, must endure with her defeated partner all
    the evils that a great overthrow must inflict upon the United
    Kingdom. Second, that Ireland, if Great Britain should be
    completely defeated, might conceivably be "taken" or annexed by
    the victor and held as a <span class="pagenum"><a name="page77"
       id="page77"></a>[pg 77]</span> conquered territory, and in
       this guise would bitterly regret the days of her union with
       Great Britain. I have sought to show, in answer to the
       latter argument, that were annexation by the victor indeed
       to follow a British defeat Ireland might very conceivably
       find the changed circumstances greatly to her advantage.</p>

    <p>But there is a third contingency I have nowhere seen
    discussed or hinted at, and yet it is at least as likely as No.
    1, and far more probable than No. 2&mdash;for I do not think
    that the annexation of Ireland by a European power is
    internationally possible, however decisive might be the
    overthrow of England. It is admitted (and it is upon this
    hypothesis that the discussion is proceeding) that Great
    Britain might be defeated by Germany, and that the British
    fleet might be broken and an enemy's sword might transfix
    England. Such an overthrow would be of enormous import to
    Europe and to the whole world. The trident would have changed
    hands, for the defeat of England could only be brought about by
    the destruction of her sea supremacy. Unless help came from
    without, a blockaded Britain would be more at the mercy of the
    victor than France was after Sedan and Paris. It would lie with
    the victor to see that the conditions of peace he imposed were
    such as, while ensuring to him the objects for which he had
    fought, would be the least likely conditions to provoke
    external intervention or a combination of alarmed world
    interests. Now, putting aside lesser consideration, the chief
    end Germany would have in a war with England would be to ensure
    her own free future on the seas. For with that assured and
    guaranteed by a victory over England, all else that she seeks
    must in the end be hers. To annex resisting British colonies
    would be in itself an impossible task&mdash;physically a much
    more impossible task than to annex Ireland.</p>

    <p>To annex Ireland would be, as a military measure, once
    command of the seas was gained, a comparatively easy task. No
    practical resistance to one German army corps even could be
    offered by any force Ireland contains, or could of herself, put
    into the field. No arsenal or means of manufacturing arms
    exists. The population has been disarmed for a century, and by
    bitter experience has been driven to regard the use of arms as
    a criminal offence. Patriotism has been treated as felony.
    Volunteers and Territorials are not for Ireland. To expect that
    a disarmed and demoralized population who have been sedulously
    batoned into a state of physical and moral dejection, should
    develop military virtues in face of a disciplined army is to
    attribute to Irishmen the very
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page78"
       id="page78"></a>[pg 78]</span> qualities their critics unite
       in denying them. "The Irishman fights well everywhere except
       in Ireland," has passed into a commonplace: and since every
       effort of government has been directed to ensuring the
       abiding application of the sneer, Englishmen would find, in
       the end, the emasculating success of their rule completely
       justified in the physical submission of Ireland to the new
       force that held her down. With Great Britain cut off and the
       Irish Sea held by German squadrons, no power from within
       could maintain any effective resistance to a German
       occupation of Dublin and a military administration of the
       island. To convert that into permanent administration could
       not be opposed from within, and with Great Britain down and
       severed from Ireland by a victorious German navy, it is
       obvious that opposition to the permanent retention of
       Ireland by the victor must come from without, and it is for
       this international reason that I think a German annexation
       of any part of a defeated United Kingdom need not be
       seriously considered. Such a complete change in the
       geography of Europe as a German-owned Ireland could not but
       provoke universal alarm and a widespread combination to
       forbid its realization. The bogey that Ireland, if not John
       Bull's other island, must necessarily be somebody else's
       other island will not really bear inspection at close
       quarters.</p>

    <p>Germany would have to attain her end, the permanent
    disabling of the maritime supremacy of Great Britain, by
    another and less provocative measure. It is here and in just
    these circumstances that the third contingency, and one no
    Englishman I venture to think, has ever dreamed of, would be
    born on the field of battle and baptized a Germanic godchild
    with European diplomacy as sponsor. Germany, for her own
    imperial ends and in pursuit of a great world policy, might
    successfully accomplish what Louis XIV and Napoleon only
    contemplated. An Ireland, already severed by a sea held by
    German warships, and temporarily occupied by a German army,
    might well be permanently and irrevocably severed from Great
    Britain, and with common assent erected into a neutralized,
    independent European State under international guarantees. An
    independent Ireland would, of itself, be no threat or hurt to
    any European interest. On the contrary, to make of Ireland an
    Atlantic Holland, a maritime Belgium, would be an act of
    restoration to Europe of this the most naturally favoured of
    European islands that a Peace Congress should, in the end, be
    glad to ratify at the instance of a victorious Germany. That
    Germany should propose this form of dissolution of the United
    Kingdom in any interests but
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page79"
       id="page79"></a>[pg 79]</span> her own, or for the <i>beaux
       yeux</i> of Ireland I do not for a moment assert. Her main
       object would be the opening of the seas and their permanent
       freeing from that overwhelming control Great Britain has
       exercised since the destruction of the French navy, largely
       based, as all naval strategists must perceive on the
       unchallenged possession of Ireland.</p>

    <p>That Ireland is primarily a European island inhabited by a
    European people who are not English, and who have for centuries
    appealed to Europe and the world to aid them in ceasing to be
    politically controlled by England, is historic fact. And since
    the translation of this historic fact into practice European
    politics would undoubtedly effect the main object of the
    victorious power, it is evident that, Great Britain once
    defeated, Germany would carry the Irish question to a European
    solution in harmony with her maritime interests, and could
    count on the support of the great bulk of European opinion to
    support the settlement those interests imposed. And if
    politically and commercially an independent and neutral Irish
    State commended itself to Europe, on moral and intellectual
    grounds the claim could be put still higher. Nothing advanced
    on behalf of England could meet the case for a free Ireland as
    stated by Germany. Germany would attain her ends as the
    champion of national liberty and could destroy England's naval
    supremacy for all time by an act of irreproachable morality.
    The United States, however distasteful from one point of view
    the defeat of England might be, could do nothing to oppose a
    European decision that could dearly win an instant support from
    influential circles&mdash;Irish and German&mdash;within her own
    borders.</p>

    <p>In any case the Monroe Doctrine cuts both ways, and unless
    at the outset the United States could be drawn into an
    Anglo-Teutonic conflict, it is clear that the decision of a
    European Congress to create a new European State out of a very
    old European people could not furnish ground for American
    interference.</p>

    <p>I need not further labour the question. If Englishmen will
    but awaken from the dream that Ireland "belongs" to them and
    not to the Irish people, and that that great and fertile
    island, inhabited by a brave, a chivalrous and an intellectual
    race (qualities they have alas! done their utmost to expel from
    the island) is a piece of real estate they own and can dispose
    of as they will, they cannot fail to perceive that the Irish
    question cannot much longer be mishandled with impunity, and
    that far from being, as they now think it, merely a party
    question&mdash;and not even a "domestic question"
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page80"
       id="page80"></a>[pg 80]</span> or one the colonies have a
       voice in&mdash;it may in a brief epoch become a European
       question.</p>

    <p>With the approaching disappearance of the Near Eastern
    question (which England is hastening to the detriment of
    Turkey) a more and more pent-in Central Europe may discover
    that there is a Near Western question, and that Ireland&mdash;a
    free Ireland&mdash;restored to Europe is the key to unlock the
    western ocean and open the seaways of the world.</p>

    <p>Again it is Mr. Gladstone who comes to remind Englishmen
    that Ireland, after all, is a European island, and that Europe
    has some distant standing in the issue.</p>

    <p>"I would beseech Englishmen to consider how they would
    behave to Ireland, if instead of having 5,000,000 of people,
    she had 25,000,000; or if instead of being placed between us
    and the ocean she were placed between us and the Continent."
    (Notes and queries on the Irish Demand, February, 1887.) While
    the geographical positions of the islands to each other and to
    Europe have not changed, and cannot change, the political
    relation of one to the other, and so the political and
    economical relation of both to Europe, to the world and to the
    carrying trade of the world and the naval policies of the
    powers may be gravely altered by agencies beyond the control of
    Great Britain.</p>

    <p>The changes wrought in the speed and capacity of steam
    shipping, the growth and visible trend of German naval power,
    and the increasing possibilities of aerial navigation, all
    unite to emphasize the historian Niebuhr's warning, and to
    indicate for Ireland a possible future of restored communion
    with Europe, and less and less the continued wrong of that
    artificial exclusion in which British policy has sought to
    maintain her&mdash;"an island beyond an island."</p>

    <h3 class="sc">Chapter IX</h3>

    <h2>THE ELSEWHERE EMPIRE</h2>

    <p>Every man born in Ireland holds a "hereditary brief" for the
    opponents of English sway, wherever they may be. The tribunal
    of history in his own land is closed to him; he must appeal to
    another court; he must seek the ear of those who make history
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page81"
       id="page81"></a>[pg 81]</span> elsewhere. The Irishman is
       denied the right of having a history, as he is denied the
       right of having a country. He must recover both. For him
       there is no past any more than a future. And if he seeks the
       record of his race in the only schools or books open to him
       he will find that hope has been shut out of the school and
       fame taken out of the story.</p>

    <p>The late John Richard Green, one of the greatest of English
    historians, was attracted to Ireland by a noble sympathy for
    the fallen which he shared with very few of his
    fellow-countrymen. We are told that he sympathized with the
    spirit of Irish nationality. "A State," he would say, "is
    accidental; it can be made or unmade; but a nation is something
    real which can be neither made nor destroyed."</p>

    <p>He had once planned a history of Ireland, "but abandoned the
    idea because the continuous record of misery and misgovernment
    was too painful to contemplate." All pleasure lies in contrast.
    The history of Ireland offers no contrast; it is a tale of
    unmitigated wrong.</p>

    <p>It is too full of graves and the ghosts are not laid yet. As
    well write the history of a churchyard. Forty years before John
    Richard Green thus explained why he had abandoned the plan of
    the graveyard, Victor Hugo lashed the front of England with
    this very thong. "Ireland turned into a cemetery; Poland
    transported to Siberia; all Italy a galleys&mdash;there is
    where we stand in this month of November, 1831!"</p>

    <p>The history of Ireland remains to be written, because the
    purpose of Ireland remains yet to be achieved. The widow of
    John Richard Green has laid the foundations of that temple of
    hope in which the youth of Ireland must enter and be sworn to
    the task that yet remains for Irishmen to accomplish.</p>

    <p>And so in closing the days of 1913 I bring, with a message
    of hope, these scattered thoughts upon the British Empire and
    its approaching dissolution to lay before the youth of Ireland.
    I say approaching dissolution advisedly, for the signs are
    there to be read. "Home Rule" will not save it. The attempt now
    being made to bribe Ireland and the greater Ireland beyond the
    seas, to the side of the Elsewhere Empire by what has been
    aptly termed a "ticket-of-leave" bill, will not suffice. The
    issue lies in stronger hands. Even could the two Irelands be
    won by the dole now offered, of a subordinate Parliament in
    Dublin, its hands tied so that it must be impotent for any
    national effort, "a Parliament"
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page82"
       id="page82"></a>[pg 82]</span> as Mr. Herbert Samuel says,
       "for the local affairs of Irishmen," there are other and
       more powerful agencies that no measure of conciliation
       within the Empire can permanently win to that system of
       world exploitation centred in London.</p>

    <p>"I would let the Irish have Home Rule," said recently Mr.
    Winston Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." But the
    last word came from Lord Morley, the "father of Home Rule."
    "Give it them," he said, in friendly, private counsel, "give it
    them; let them have the full savour of their own dunghill
    civilization."</p>

    <p>But the last word of all will come, not from Lord Morley, or
    "Home Rule," but from the land and the myriad peoples whose
    ancient civilization, Lord Morley, like every preceding
    Viceroy, has striven to bury under the dunghill of British
    supremacy in India, and to hide the very outlines of the
    ancient body of the set designs of a new purpose. The capital
    of British India is to be the "new Delhi," planned in
    Whitehall, but paid for in India&mdash;the apotheosis of dung.
    The new India will make short work of "the new Delhi."</p>

    <p>"An unplumbed, salt, estranging sea" of moral and spiritual
    separation sets between the imperial conception as nourished in
    Britain and the growing hope of the great millions of mankind
    who make up the greatest realm of her empire.</p>

    <p>Ireland <i>might</i> be bought or bribed, at any rate in
    this generation, to forfeit her national ideals and barter the
    aspiration that six centuries of contact with England have
    failed to kill; but the 350,000,000 of Indian mankind can never
    be, or bought, or bribed in the end.</p>

    <p>Even if Ireland forgot the deathless words of Grattan,
    delivered in the subordinate Parliament of 1780, those words
    will find a response in the hearts of men who never heard of
    Grattan. For the voice of the Irish patriot was, in truth, a
    world voice&mdash;a summons to every audience wherever men
    gather in quest of freedom. The prophesy Grattan uttered in the
    name of Ireland assuredly will be fulfilled, and that in the
    life time of many of us, in that greater Ireland England holds
    in the eastern seas by the very same tide of raid, conquest and
    spoliation that has given her our own land.</p>

    <p>Substitute India for Ireland and the Grattan of 1780 becomes
    the Indian patriot of to-day.</p>

    <p>"I will never be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager
    in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking in his
    rags; he may be naked, he shall not be in irons; and I do see
    the time is at hand; <span class="pagenum"><a name="page83"
       id="page83"></a>[pg 83]</span> the spirit has gone forth,
       the declaration is planted; and though great men should
       apostasize, yet the cause will live; and though the public
       speaker should die, yet the immortal fire shall outlast the
       organ which conveyed it, and the breath of liberty, like the
       word of holy men, will not die with the prophet, but survive
       him."</p>

    <p>Were Ireland to accept the bribe now offered she would
    indeed justify the reproach of Wilfred Blunt; but she would
    become some thing else than a "weapon of offence in England's
    hands against the freedom of the world elsewhere;" she would
    share, and rightly share the fate of the parasite growth that,
    having gripped her trunk so tightly, has by that aid reached
    the sunlight. The British Empire is no northern oak tree. It is
    a creeping, climbing plant that has fastened on the limbs of
    others and grown great from a sap not its own. If we seek an
    analogy for it in the vegetable and not in the animal world we
    must go to the forests of the tropics and not to the northland
    woodlands. In the great swamps at the mouth of the Amazon the
    naturalist Bates describes a monstrous liana, the "Sipo
    Matador" or Murdering Creeper, that far more fitly than the oak
    tree of the north typifies John Bull and the place he has won
    in the sunlight by the once strong limbs of Ireland.</p>

    <p>Speaking of the forests round Para, Bates says:&mdash;"In
    these tropical forests each plant and tree seems to be striving
    to outvie its fellows, struggling upwards towards light and
    air&mdash;branch and leaf and stem&mdash;regardless of its
    neighbours. Parasitic plants are seen fastening with firm grip
    on others, making use of them with reckless indifference as
    instruments for their own advancement. Live and let live is
    clearly not the maxim taught in these wildernesses. There is
    one kind of parasitic tree very common near Para which exhibits
    this feature in a very prominent manner. It is called the "Sipo
    Matador," or Murderer Liana. It belongs to the fig order, and
    has been described and figured by Von Martius as the Atlas to
    Spix and Martius' Travels. I observed many specimens. <i>The
    base of its stem would be unable to bear the weight of the
    upper growth</i>; it is obliged therefore to support itself on
    a tree of <i>another species</i>. In this it is not essentially
    different from other climbing trees and plants, but the way the
    Matador sets about it is peculiar and produces certainly a
    disagreeable impression. It springs up close to the tree on
    which it intends to fix itself, and the wood of its stem grows
    by spreading itself like a plastic mould over one side of the
    trunk of its supporter. It then puts forth, from each side, an
    armlike branch, which grows rapidly, and looks as though a
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page84"
       id="page84"></a>[pg 84]</span> stream of sap were flowing
       and hardening as it went. This adheres closely to the trunk
       of the victim, and the two arms meet at the opposite side
       and blend together. These arms are put forth at somewhat
       regular intervals in mounting upwards, and the victim, when
       its strangler is full grown, becomes tightly clasped by a
       number of inflexible rings. These rings gradually grow
       larger as the Murderer flourishes, rearing its crown of
       foliage to the sky mingled with that of its neighbour, and
       in course of time they kill it, by stopping the flow of its
       sap. The strange spectacle now remains of the selfish
       parasite clasping in its arms the lifeless and decaying body
       of its victim, which had been a help to its own growth. Its
       ends have been served&mdash;it has flowered and fruited,
       reproduced and disseminated its kind; and <i>now when the
       dead trunk moulders away its own end approaches; its support
       is gone and itself also falls</i>."</p>

    <p>The analogy is almost the most perfect in literature, and if
    we would not see it made perfect in history we must get rid of
    the parasite grip before we are quite strangled. If we would
    not share the coming darkness we must shake off the murderer's
    hold, before murderer and victim fall together. That fall is
    close at hand. A brave hand may yet cut the "Sipo Matador," and
    the slayer be slain before he has quite stifled his victim.</p>

    <p>If that hand be not a European one, then may it come,
    bronzed, keen, and supple from the tropic calm! The birds of
    the forest are on the wing.</p>

    <p>Regions Caesar never knew, including Hibernia, have come
    under the eagles, nay the vultures, of imperial Britain. But
    the lion's maw is full.</p>

    <p>At length the overgorged beast of prey, with all the
    diseases in his veins that over-eating brings, finds that his
    claws are not so sharp as they were, that his belly is much
    heavier when he tries to leap and that it is now chiefly by his
    voice he still scares his enemies.</p>

    <p>The Empire of England dates from Tudor times. Henry VIII was
    the first John Bull. When the conquered Irish and the wealth
    derived from their rich country England set out to lay low
    every free people that had a country worth invading and who, by
    reasons of their non-imperial instinct were not prepared to
    meet her on equal terms. India she overran by the same methods
    as had given her Ireland.</p>

    <p>Wholesale plunder, treachery and deceit met at her council
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page85"
       id="page85"></a>[pg 85]</span> board under a succession of
       Governors and Viceroys, whose policy was that of Captain
       Kidd, and whose ante-room of state led every native prince
       to the slippery plank. The thing became the most colossal
       success upon earth. No people were found able to withstand
       such a combination. How could peoples still nursed in the
       belief of some diviner will ruling men's minds resist such
       an attack?</p>

    <p>For one brief space Napoleon reared his head; and had he
    cast his vision to. Ireland instead of to Egypt he would have
    found out the secret of the pirate's stronghold. But the fates
    willed otherwise; the time was not yet. He sailed for
    Alexandria, lured by a dream, instead of for Cork; and the
    older Imperialists beat the new Imperialists and secured a
    fresh century of unprecedented triumph. The Pyramids looked
    down on Waterloo; but the headlands of Bantry Bay concealed the
    mastery, and the mystery, of the seas.</p>

    <p>With 1811 was born the era of Charles Peace, no less than of
    John Bull&mdash;on Sundays and Saint's days a churchwarden, who
    carried the plate; on week days a burglar who lifted it. Truly,
    as John Mitchel said on his convict hulk: "On English felony
    the sun never sets." May it set in 1915.</p>

    <p>From Napoleon's downfall to the battle of Colenso, the
    Empire founded by Henry VIII has swelled to monstrous size.
    Innumerable free peoples have bit the dust and died with
    plaintive cries to heaven. The wealth of London has increased a
    thousand fold, and the giant hotels and caravanserais have
    grown, at the millionaire's touch, to rival the palaces of the
    Caesars.</p>

    <p>"All's well with God's world"&mdash;and poet and plagiarist,
    courtier and courtesan, Kipling and cant&mdash;these now dally
    by the banks of the Thames and dine off the peoples of the
    earth, just as once the degenerate populace of imperial Rome
    fed upon the peoples of the Pyramids. But the thing is near the
    end. The "secret of Empire" is no longer the sole possession of
    England. Other peoples are learning to think imperially. The
    Goths and the Visigoths of modern civilisation are upon the
    horizon. Action must soon follow thought. London, like Rome,
    will have strange guests. They will not pay their hotel bills.
    Their day is not yet but it is at hand. "Home Rule" assemblies
    and Indian "Legislative Councils" may prolong the darkness; but
    the dawn is in die sky. And in the downfall of the Tudor
    Empire, both Ireland and India shall escape from the
    destruction and join again the free civilizations of the
    earth.</p>

    <p>The birds of the forest are on the
    wing.</p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page86"
       id="page86"></a>[pg 86]</span>

    <p>It is an Empire in these straights that turns to America,
    through Ireland, to save it. And the price it offers
    is&mdash;war with Germany. France may serve for a time, but
    France like Germany, is in Europe, and in the end it is all
    Europe and not only Germany England assails. Permanent
    confinement of the white races, as distinct from the
    Anglo-Saxon variety, can only be achieved by the active support
    and close alliance of the American people. These people are
    to-day, unhappily republicans and free men, and have no
    ill-will for Germany and a positive distaste for imperialism.
    It is not really in their blood. That blood is mainly Irish and
    German, the blood of men not distinguished in the past for
    successful piracy and addicted rather to the ways of peace. The
    wars that Germany has waged have been wars of defence, or wars
    to accomplish the unity of her people. Irish wars have been
    only against one enemy, and ending always in material disaster
    they have conferred always a moral gain. Their memory uplifts
    the Irish heart; for no nation, no people, can reproach Ireland
    with having wronged them. She has injured no man.</p>

    <p>And now, to-day, it is the great free race of this common
    origin of peace-loving peoples, filling another continent, that
    is being appealed to by every agency of crafty diplomacy, in
    every garb but that of truth, to aid the enemy of both and the
    arch-disturber of the old world. The jailer of Ireland seeks
    Irish-American support to keep Ireland in prison; the intriguer
    against Germany would win German-American good-will against its
    parent stock. There can be no peace for mankind, no limit to
    the intrigues set on foot to assure Great Britain "the mastery
    of the seas."</p>

    <p>If "America" will but see things aright, as a good
    "Anglo-Saxon" people should, she will take her place beside,
    nay, even a little in front of John Bull in the plunder of the
    earth. Were the "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" ever consummated it
    would be the biggest crime in human history. That alliance is
    meant by the chief party seeking it to be a perpetual threat to
    the peoples of Europe, nay, to the whole of mankind outside the
    allied ranks. And instead of bringing peace it must assuredly
    bring the most distracting and disastrous conflict that has
    ever stained the world with blood.</p>

    <p>John Bull has now become the great variety artist, one in
    truth whose infinite variety detention cannot stale any more
    than Customs officers can arrest the artist's baggage.</p>

    <p>At one moment the "Shirt King," being prosecuted for the
    <span class="pagenum"><a name="page87"
       id="page87"></a>[pg 87]</span> sale of cheap cottons as
       "Irish Linen" in London; the next he lands the "Bloater
       King" in New York, offering small fish as something very
       like a whale. And the offer in both cases is made in the
       tongue of Shakespeare.</p>

    <p>The tongue has infinite uses; from China it sounds the "call
    for prayer," and lo, the Book of Dividends opens at the right
    text. Were Bull ever caught in the act, and put from the trade
    of international opium-dosing to that of picking oakum and the
    treadmill we should hear him exclaim, as he went out of sight,
    "Behold me weaving the threads of democratic destiny as I climb
    the golden stair."</p>

    <p>The rôles are endless! In Ireland, the conversion of
    Irishmen into cattle; in England, the conversion of Irish
    cattle into men; in India and Egypt the suppression of the
    native press; in America the subsidising of the non-native
    press; the tongue of Shakespeare has infinite uses. He only
    poached deer&mdash;it would poach dreadnoughts. The emanations
    of Thames sewage are all over the world, and the sewers are
    running still. The penalty for the pollution of the Thames is a
    high one; but the prize for the pollution of the Mississippi is
    still higher; the fountains of the deep, the mastery of the
    great waters, these are the things John Bull seeks on the shore
    of the "Father of Waters."</p>

    <p>The sunset of the fading Empire would turn those waters into
    blood. The British Empire was not founded in peace; how, then
    can it be kept by peace, or ensured by peace-treaties? It was
    born of pillage and blood-shed, and has been maintained by
    both; and it cannot now be secured by a common language any
    more than a common Bible. The lands called the British Empire
    belong to many races, and it is only by the sword and not by
    the Book of Peace or any pact of peace that those races can be
    kept from the ownership of their own countries.</p>

    <p>The "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" means a compact to ensure slavery
    and beget war. The people who fought the greatest war in modern
    history to release slaves are not likely to begin the greatest
    war in all history to beget slaves.</p>

    <p>Let the truth be known in America that England wants to turn
    the great Republic of free men into die imperial ally of the
    great Empire of bought men, and that day die "Anglo-Saxon
    Alliance" gives place to the Declaration of Independence.</p>

    <p>The true alliance to aim at for all who love peace is the
    friendly Union of Germany, America and Ireland. These are the
    true United States of the world.</p>

    <p>Ireland, the link between Europe and America, must be freed
    by both.</p>

    <p>Denied to-day free intercourse with either, she yet forms in
    the great designs of Providence the natural bond to bring the
    old world and the new together.</p>

    <p>May 1915 lay the foundation of this&mdash;the true Hundred
    Years of Peace!</p>







<pre>





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