Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/81

Rh as favorable terms of entry into that British possession as the Japanese enjoyed.

They pointed out that a Japanese could enter Canada on showing that he held from six pounds to ten pounds, but that no British Indian could land unless he had forty pounds and had come direct from India—a physical impossibility, since no direct communication exists. But they went further, for they showed that their "citizenship" of the British Empire entailed penalties that no foreign State anywhere imposed upon them.

"We appeal," they said, "and most forcibly bring to your notice that no such discriminating laws are existing against us in foreign countries like the United States of America, Germany, Japan, and Africa, to whom we do not owe any allegiance whatsoever."

So that outside its white or European races it is clear the Empire has no general or equal citizenship, and that, far from being one, it is more divided racially against itself than are even opposing Asiatic and European nations which have the good fortune not to be united in a common imperial bond.

The total white population of this incongruous mass in 1911 consisted of some 59,000,000 human beings made up of various national and racial strains, as against 66,000,000 of white men in the German Empire, the vast majority of them of German blood. And while the latter form a disciplined, self-contained, and self-supporting and self - defending whole, the former are swelled by Irish. French-Canadians, and Dutch South Africans who, according to Sir R. Edgcumbe, must be reckoned as "colored."

It is one thing to paint the map red, but you must be sure that your colors are fast and that the stock of paints won't run out. England apart from her other perplexities is now faced with this prospect. Great Britain can no longer count on Ireland, that most prolifix source of