Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/38

 32 self-governing colonies are to-day great states, well able to defend themselves from over-seas attack. The defeat of the British navy would make scarcely at all easier the landing of German troops in, say, Australia, South Africa, or New Zealand. A war of conquest of those far distant regions would be, for Germany, an impossible and a stupidly impossible task.

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.

The thing does not bear inspection and may be dismissed from our calculation.

The only territories that England could cede by her own act to a victorious Power are such as, in themselves, are not suited to colonization by a white race. Doubtless, Germany would seek compensation for the expenses of the war in requiring the transfer of some of these latter territories of the British Crown to herself. There are points in Tropical Africa, in the East, islands in the ocean to-day flying the British flag that might, with profit to German trade and influence, be acquired by a victorious Germany. But none of these things in itself, nor all of them put together, would meet the requirements of the German case, or ensure to Germany that future tranquil expansion and peaceful rivalry the war had been fought to secure. England would be weakened, and to some extend impoverished by a war ending which such results; but her great asset, her possession beyond price would