Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/14

 8 grows too strong, the old-time British love of compromise and trust in luck still holds his hand. The American "alliance," too, may yet come off. The entente with France, already of great value, can be developed into something more assuredly anti-German, and if present day relations of friendship with the United States can be but tightened into a mutual committal of both Powers to a common foreign policy, then the raid on Germany may never be needed. She can be bottled up without it. No man who studies the British mind can have any doubt of the fixed trend of British thought.

It can be summed up in one phrase. German expansion is not to be tolerated. It can only be a threat to or attained at the expense of British interests. Those interests being world-wide, with the seas for their raiment—nay, with the earth for their footstool—it follows that wherever Germany may turn for an outlet she is met by the British challenge:"Not There!" British interests interdict the Old World; the Monroe Doctrine, maintained, it is alleged by British naval supremacy, forbids the New.

Let Germany acquire a coaling station, a sanitorium. a health resort, the ground for a hotel even, on some foreign shore and "British interests'" spring to attention, English jealousy is aroused. How long this state of tension can last without snapping could, perhaps, be best answered in the German naval yards. It is evident that some 70,000,000 of the best educated race in the world, physically strong, mentally stronger, homogenous, highly trained, highly skilled, capable and energetic and obedient to a discipline that rests upon and is moulded by a lofty conception of patriotism, cannot permanently be confined to a strictly limited area by a less numerous race, less well educated, less strong mentally and physically, and assuredly less well trained, skilled and disciplined. Stated thus the problem admits of a simple answer; and were