Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/59

Rh If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace—"right of the sword to be shattered by the sword"—what right has England to Ireland, to Dublin, to Cork? She holds Ireland by exactly the same title as that by which Turkey has hitherto held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonica—a right of invasion, of seizure, of demoralization. If Turkey's rights, nearly six hundred years old, can be shattered in a day by one successful campaign, and if the Powers of Europe can insist, with justice, that this successful sword shall outweigh the occupation of centuries, then, indeed, have the Powers, led by England, furnished a precedent in the Near East which the victor in the next great struggle should not be slow to apply to the Near West, when a captive Ireland shall be rescued from the hands of a conqueror whose title is no better, indeed, somewhat worse than that of Turkey to Macedonia. And when the day of defeat shall strike for the Turkey of the Near West, then shall an assembled Europe remember the arguments of 1912—13 and a freed Ireland shall be justified on the very grounds England to-day has been the first to advance against a defeated Turkey.

"But the Turk is an Asiatic." say the English Bashaws: to which, indeed, Europe might aptly reply, "and are the English European or non-European?" The moral argument and the "Asiatic argument" are strange texts for the desecrator of Christian Ireland to appeal to against that continent which she would fain hem in with Malayan and Indian battleships and Canadian and Australasian dreadnoughts. Not the moral argument, but the anti-German argument, furnishes the real ground for the changed British attitude in the present war.

The moral failure of Turkey, her inability to govern her Christian peoples, is only the pretext; but just as the moral argument brings its strange revenges and shows an Ireland that has suffered all that Macedonia has