Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/100

94 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 the 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.

The birds of the forest are on the wing.

It is an Empire in these straits 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 freemen, 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 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.

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