Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/102

96 emanations of Thames sewage are all over the world, and the sewers are running still. The penalty for pollution of the Thames is a high one; but the prize for the pollution of the Mississipi is higher still: the fountains of the deep, the mastery of the great waters, these are the things John Bull seeks on the shores of the “Father of Waters.”

The sunset of a 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 bloodshed, and has been maintained by both; and it cannot now be secured by a common language any more than by 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.

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.

Let the truth be known in America that England wants to turn the great Republic of freemen into the imperial ally of the great Empire of bought men, and that day the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” gives place to the Declaration of Independence.

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.

Ireland, the link between Europe and America, must be freed by both.

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.

May 1915 lay the foundations of this—the true Hundred Years of Peace!