Roger Casement

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is England and English ambition that beget the state of mind responsible for the enormous growth of armaments that now overshadows 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. The prophesy Grattan uttered in the name of Ireland assuredly will be fulfilled, and that in the lifetime of many of us, in that greater Ireland England holds in the Eastern Seas by the very same title of raid, conquest and spoliation that has given her our own land. ”

“ Yes, there she stands, the Irish charwoman, the old broom in her hand and preparing for one last clean 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 a 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 the house. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. Our part may be at first a passive one, or we may be able to make it something more, but the day a German squadron holds the Irish Sea and communication with Great Britain is cut off, that day shall be the first day of Irish freedom, and the first day of freedom on the seas for Europe. ”

“ 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 precedent Satrap, has striven to bury under the dunghill of British supremacy in India, and to hide the very outlines of the ancient body in the set designs of a new purpose.
Civilization has her triumphs of destruction no less than of construction, as the submerged pillars of Philæ attest. In India the task is to obliterate by construction. ”

“ Ireland never is, but only always has been cursed by English rule. He, himself, the Englishman of the day, is always a simple, bluff, goodhearted 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. ”

“ If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace—"right of the sword to be shattered by the sword"—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, Salonica—a right of invasion, of seizure, of demoralization. ”

“ 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 honor, while England appropriated the markets of mankind. Thenceforth, for the best part of a century, while Europe was spent in what, to the superior Briton 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. ”

“ Every way out lies only through and across Britain.
Almost everything that Ireland produces, or consumes, must all go out or come in solely through England and on payment of a transit and shipping tax to English trade.
The London press has lately waxed indignant over Servia denied by Austria a port on the Adriatic, and we have been told that 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. ”

“ 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 goodwill 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.” ”

“ From whatever point of view we survey it we shall find that England's Empire at bottom rests upon Ireland, and requires the continued exploitation of 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—she gives all and takes nothing. Men, mind, food, and money—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. ”

“ 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.
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. ”

“ Were Ireland to accept the bribe now offered she would indeed justify the reproach of Wilfrid Blunt: but she Avould become something 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 foundation in honor and honesty—but not till then. 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. ”

“ 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 amoral gain. Their memory uplifts the Irish heart: for no nation, no people can reproach Ireland with having wronged them. She has injured no man. ”

“ With over a thousand 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Phillip III, if an outcast from European civilization none 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. ”

“ A defeated England could not cede any of those British possessions as a price of peace, for they are inhabited by freemen 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 merely 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 a probably crippled fleet. ”

“ 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 defense of their own land to the extension of the power and wealth of the realm that impoverished it at home. ”

“ 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 of Henry VIII onwards. The vital importance of Ireland to Europe is not and has not been understood by any European statesman. ”