Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/47

 Rh sought an explanation of this failure of his fleet, was given a reply that I cannot refrain from recommending to the British Admiralty to-day. "Well, Sire," replied the French diplomatist who knew the circumstances, "both the Admirals were old women, but ours was at least a lady." If British Admirals cannot put to sea without incurring this risk, they might, at least, take the bumboat woman with them to prescribe the courtesies of naval debate.

That England to-day loves America no one who goes to the private opinions of Englishmen, instead of to their published utterances, or the interested eulogies of their press, can for a moment believe.

The old dislike is there, the old supercilious contempt for the "Yankee" and all his ways. "God's Englishman" no more loves an American citizen now than when in 1846 he seriously contemplated an invasion of the United States and the raising of the negro-slave population against his "Anglo-Saxon kinsmen."

To-day when we near so much of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance it may be well to revert to that page of history. For it will show us that if a British Premier to-day can speak as Mr. Asquith did on December 16th, 1912, in his reference to the late American Ambassador as "a great American and a kinsman," one "sprung from a common race, speaking our own language, sharing with us by birth as by inheritance not a few of our most cherished traditions and participating when he comes here by what I may describe as his natural right in our domestic, interests and celebrations," then this new-found kinship takes its birth not in a sense of common race, indeed, but in a very common fear of Germany.

In the year 1846, the British army was engaged in robbing the Irish people of their harvest in order that the work of the famine should be complete and that the then too great population of Ireland should be reduced within