Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/42

 36 war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of the Old World.

If Europe would not strangle herself with her own hands she must strangle the Sea serpent whose coils enfold her shores.

Inspect the foundations of European armaments where we will, and we shall find that the Master Builder is he who fashioned the British Empire It is that Empire, its claim to a universal right of pre-emption to every zone and region washed by the waves and useful or necessary to the expansion of the white races, and its assertion of a right to control at will all the seas of all the world that drives the peoples of Europe into armed camps. The policy of the Boer War is being tried on a vaster scale against Europe. Just as England beat the Boers by concentration camps and not by arms, by money and not by men, so she seeks to-day to erect an armor-plate barrier around the one European people she fears to meet in the field, and to turn all Central Europe into a vast concentration camp. By use of the longest purse she has already carried this barrier well towards completion. One gap remains, and it is to make sure that this opening, too, shall be closed, that she now directs all the force of her efforts. Here the longest purse is of less avail, so England draws upon another armory. She appeals to the longest tongue in history—the longest and something else.

In order to make sure the encompassing of Europe with a girdle of steel it is necessary to circle the United States with a girdle of lies. With America true to the policy of her great founder, an America, "the friend of all Powers but the ally of none," English designs against European civilization must in the end fail. Those plans can succeed only by active American support, and to secure this is now the supreme task and aim of British stealth and skill.