Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/61

Rh a November, (1912), issue of the Daily News we find a representative Englishman (Sir R. Edgcumbe), addressing that Liberal journal in words that no one but an Englishman would dream of giving public utterance to. Sir R. Edgcumbe deprecated a statement that had gone round to the effect that the Malayan battleship was not a free gift of the toiling Tamils, Javanese, Chinese, and other rubber workers who make up, with a few Malays, the population of that peninsula, but was really the fruit of an arbitrary tax imposed on these humble but indifferent Asiatics by their English administration.

Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgcumbe asserted these poor workers nourished a reverence "bordering on veneration" for the Englishman. "This is shown in a curious way by their refusing to call any European 'a white man' save the Englisman alone. The German trader, the Italian, the Frenchman and all are, in their speech, 'colored men.'"

After this appreciation of themselves the English cannot object to the present writer's view that they are non-Europeans.

Thus, while the Eastern question is being settled while I write, by the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, England, who leads the cry in the name of Europe, is preparing the exclusion of Europe from all world affairs that can be dominated by sea power. Lands and peoples held for centuries by Turkey by a right not less moral than that by which England has held Ireland, are being forcibly restored to Europe. So be it.

With the settlement of the Eastern question by this act of restitution Europe must inevitably gain the clarity of vision to deal with the Western question by a similar act of restoration.

The Western Macedonia must go the way of its Eastern fellow. Like those of the Orient, the problems of the