Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/60

54 suffered, and this at the hands of Christians, and not of Moslems, so the triumph of the Balkan Allies, far from benefiting Britain, must, in the end, react to her detriment.

The present apparent injury to German interests by the closing of Southeastern Europe and the road to Asia Minor, will inevitably force Germany to still more resolutely face the problem of opening the western seaways. To think otherwise is to believe that Germany will accept a quite impossible position tamely and without a struggle.

Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the New Southern Slav states on the South East, with a vengeful France being incited on her Western frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways of the world. The Canadian naval vote, the Malayan "gift" of a battleship, come as fresh rivets in the chain forged for the perpetual binding of the seas, or it might more truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the hands of the German people.

We read in a recent periodical how these latest naval developments portend the coming of the day when "the Imperial navy shall keep the peace of the seas as a policeman does the peace of the streets. The time is coming when a naval war (except by England), will be as relentlessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas." (Review of Reviews, December, 1912.)

The naive arrogance of this utterance is characteristically English. It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the Churchill Glasgow speech and the fullest justification of the criticism of the Kreuz-Zeitung already quoted. It does not stand alone; it could be paralleled in the columns of any ordinary English paper—Liberal as much as Conservative—every day in the week. Nothing is clearer than that no Englishman can think of other nations save in terms of permanent inferiority. Thus, for instance, in