Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/101

Rh 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.”

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.

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

At one moment the “Shirt King,” being prosecuted for the 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.

That tongue has infinite uses: from China it sounds the “Call for prayer,” and lo, the Book of Dividend 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!”

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 subsidizing of the non-native Press. The tongue of Shakespeare has infinite uses. He only poached deer—it would poach Dreadnoughts. The