Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/49

 Rh "As to the war the Duke says he could smash the Yankees, and ought to do so while France is in her present humor and Mexico opens the road to invasion, from the South—not to speak of the terrible threat that Napier uttered, that with two regiments of infantry and a field battery he'd raise the slave population in the United States."

The infamy of this suggestion cannot be surpassed. The brilliant soldier who conceived it was the chivalrous Englishman who conquered Scinde, one of the chief glories of the Britannic hierarchy of soldier-saints.

The Government planning it was that of the late Queen Victoria with the Duke of Wellingtons advice, and the people against whom the black slave millions were to be loosed were the "kith and kin" of those meditating this atrocious form of massacre. Truly, as an old Irish proverb, old even in the days of Henry VIII, put it, "the pride of France, the treason of England and the warre of Irelande shall never have end."

As a latter-day witness of that treason, one who had suffered it and knew it from birth to the prison cell, a dead Irishman speaks to us from the grave. Michael Davitt, in a letter to Morrison Davidson, on August 27th, 1902, thus summed up in final words what every Irishman feels in his heart:

"The idea of being ruled by Englishmen is to me the chief agony of existence. They are a nation without faith, truth or conscience, enveloped in a panoplied pharasaism and an incurable hypocrisy. Their moral appetite is fed on falsehood. They profess Christianity and believe only in Mammon. They talk of liberty while ruling India and Ireland against the principles of a constitution, professed as a political faith, but prostituted to the interests of class and landlord rule."