Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/39

 Rh still be hers—her geographical position. Deprive her today, say, of the Gold Coast, the Niger. Gibraltar, even of Egypt, impose a heavy indemnity, and while Germany would barely have recouped herself for the out-of-pocket losses of the war. England in fact would have lost nothing, and ten years hence the Teuton would look out again upon the same prospect, a Europe still dominated beyond the seas by the Western Islanders.

The work would have to be done all over again. A second Punic war would have to be fought with this disadvantage—that the Atlantic Sicily would be held and used still against the Northern Rome by the Atlantic Carthage.

A victorious Germany, in addition to such terms as she may find it well to impose in her own immediate financial or territorial interests, must so draft her peace conditions as to preclude her great antagonist from ever again seriously imperilling the freedom of the seas. I know of no way save one to make sure the open seas. Ireland, in the name of Europe, and in the exercise of European right to free the seas from the over-lordship of one European island must be resolutely withdrawn from British custody. A second Berlin conference, an international Congress must debate, and clearly would debate, with growing unanimity the German proposal to restore Ireland to Europe.

The arguments in favor of that proposal would soon become so clear from the general European standpoint that save England and her defeated allies, no Power would oppose it.

Considerations of expediency no less than naval, mercantile, and moral claims would range themselves on the side of Germany and a free Ireland. For a free Ireland, not owned or exploited by England, but appertaining to Europe at large, its ports available in a sense they never Rh