Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/46

 40 have never warred upon him, and whose sole crime is that they are highly efficient rivals in the peaceful rivalry of commerce, navigation, and science.

We are told, for instance, in one of the popular London magazines for January, 1913, in an article upon the financial grievances of the British navy that were it not for Germany there would be to-day another Spithead mutiny. "Across the North Sea is a nation which some fifty years ago was so afraid of the French navy that it panicked itself into building an iron-clad fleet.

"To-day, as the second naval Power, its menace is too great for any up-to-date Spithead mutiny to come off. But the pay question was so acute that it is possibly only the Germans and their 'menace' that saved us from trouble."

But while the patriotism of the "lower deck" may have been sufficiently stout to avert this peril, the patriotism of the quarter-deck is giving us a specimen of its quality that certainly could not be exhibited in any other country in the world.

Even as I write I read in the "British Review" how Admiral Sir Percy Scott attacks Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, dubs him "the laughing-stock of the fleet," accuses him of publishing in his book, "The Betrayal," a series of "deliberate falsehoods," and concludes by saying that the gallant Admiral is "not a seaman."

And it is a fleet commanded by such Admirals as these that is to sweep the German navy from the seas!

During the Crimean War the allied British and French navies distinguished themselves by their signal failure to effect the reduction of such minor fortresses as Sveaborg, Helsingfors and the fortified lighthouses upon the Gulf of Finland. Their respective Admirals fired their severest broadsides into each other, and the bombardment of the forts was silenced by the smart interchange of nautical civilities between the two flagships. Napoleon III, who