Roger Casement

“ 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 only 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. ”

“ Ireland might 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.
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—a summons to every audience wherever men gather in quest of freedom. ”

“ In Ireland alone in this twentieth century is loyalty held to be a crime. If loyalty be something less than love and more than law, then we have had enough of such loyalty for Ireland or Irishmen. If we are to be indicted as criminals, to be shot as murderers, to be imprisoned as convicts because our offence is that we love Ireland more than we value our lives, then I know not what virtue resides in any offer of self-government held out to brave men on such terms. Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth ”

“ Did not thy brow its glory share,
Were thou not ever next my chair.
"Were I a God, my heaven would be
One long, lone, vast sterility,
Eternal only in its woe
Did thou not all its purpose know.
"Were I a saint, my midnight cell
Would be the portico of hell,
Did not my scourging heart attest
Thy love dwells in a stricken breast."
[Pg 3]
"Love's Horizon"
Love is the salt sea's savour,
Love is the palm-tree's sheen,
Love is the sky of evening. ”

“ 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. ”

“ England relies on money, Germany on men. And just as Roman men beat Carthagian 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 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 valor of the foreigner (Irish, Indian, African) , go down before the men of United Germany. ”

“ But for the Attorney General of England there is only “England”—is no Ireland, there is only the law of England—no right of Ireland; the liberty of Ireland and of Irish is to be judged by the power of England. Yet for me, the Irish outlaw, there is a land of Ireland, a right of Ireland, and a charter for all Irishmen to appeal to, in the last resort, a charter that even the very statutes of England itself cannot deprive us of—nay, more, a charter that Englishmen themselves assert as the fundamental bond of law that connects the two kingdoms. ”

“ The Triumph of Hugh O'Neill
Beal an Altra Buidhe (The Fight of the Yellow Ford, 1598.)
Speed the joyful news of victory from Dungannon to Gweedore,
Let the shout of triumph echo 'mid the cliffs of dark Benmore,
Let the flame that gleams on Sperrin light a flame on every strand,
Till one mighty blaze shall tell it to all men throughout the land.
The haughty Saxon boasted he would ravage broad Tyrone,
And lay our fields in ashes, and make our flocks his own,
Nor hold his hand 'till humbled each Irish kerne should kneel
To England's monarch only, and not to Hugh O'Neill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 dominion of England and English-speaking elements. 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. ”

“ That, my lord, is the condemnation of English rule, of English-made law, of English Government in Ireland, that it dare not rest on the will of the Irish people, but it exists in defiance of their will—that it is a rule derived not from right, but from conquest. Conquest, my lord, gives no title, and if it exists over the body, it fails over the mind. It can exert no empire over men’s reason and judgment and affections ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 for so long been purposely withheld by the act of Europe. ”

“ It is not necessary to climb the painful stairs of Irish history—that treadmill of a nation whose labours are in vain for her own uplifting as the convict’s exertions are for his redemption—to review the long list of British promises made only to be broken—of Irish hopes raised only to be dashed to the ground. Home Rule when it comes, if come it does, will find an Ireland drained of all that is vital to its very existence—unless it be that unquenchable hope we build on the graves of the dead. ”

“ It is an Empire in these straights that turns to America, through Ireland, to save it. And the price it offers is—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. ”

“ 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 lias ever stained the world with blood. ”

“ 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.
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.
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. ”

“ 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 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 title is no better, indeed, somewhat worse than that of Turkey to Macedonia. ”

“ 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—a Europe submitted to the despotism of unnatural alliances designed to arrest the laws of progress. ”

“ To-day we see the triumph of British diplomacy. Russia and France have been nerved up to the task. The sword has been drawn against Germany, and England, confident now that come what may she must gain her object (the destruction of German sea power, shipping and commerce) , enters joyfully into a struggle that while it shall never touch her own shores, or interrupt or lessen a single English meal, must end in the laying waste of Germany and the annihilation of the only European people who had shown themselves capable of serious competition in the peaceful arts of commerce and industry. ”

“ 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. ”