Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/77

 Rh worthy of freedom. It was not by Act of Parliament or gift of the hater that Aodh O'Neill sought to win freedom for Ireland. Nay, rather will Irish liberty come as the gift of the halter.

The dead who die for Ireland are the only live men in a free Ireland. The rest is cattle. Freedom is kept alive in man's blood only by shedding of that blood. It was not an act of a foreign Parliament they were seeking, those splendid "scorners of death," the lads and young men of Mayo, who awaited with a fearless joy the English army fresh from the defeat of Humbert in 1798. Then, if ever. Irishmen might have run from a victorious and pitiless enemy who, having captured the French General and murdered in cold blood the seven hundred Killala peasants who were with his colors, were now come to Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the last stronghold of Irish rebellion.

The ill led and half armed peasants, the last Irishmen in Ireland to stand in pitched fight for their country's freedom, went to meet the army of England, as the Protestant Bishop, who saw them, says: "running upon death with as little appearance of reflection or concern as if they were hastening to a show."

The late Queen Victoria, in one of her letters to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abortive rising of fifty years later in 1848:

"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland, and I think it is very likely to go off without any contest which people (and I think rightly), rather regret. The Irish should receive A GOOD LESSON OR THEY WILL BEGIN AGAIN." (Page 223, Vol. II., Queen Victoria's Letters). Her Majesty was profoundly right. Ireland needed that lesson in 1848, as she needs it still more to-day. Had Irishmen died in 1848 as they did in 1798 Ireland to-day would be fifty years nearer to