Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/83

 Rh While the navy shows an imposing output of new battleships and cruisers for 1 913, the record, we are told, of all warship construction in the world, it takes blood as well as iron to cement empires. Battleships may become so much floating scrap iron (like the Russian fleet at Tsushima), if the men behind the guns lack the right stamina and education.

We learn, too, that it is not only the slum dwellers who are failing, but that to meet the shortage of officers a large number of transfers from the Merchant Marine to the Royal Navy are being sanctioned. To this must be added the call of the Great Dominions for men and officers to man their local fleets. As the vital resources of England become more and more inadequate to meet the menace of German naval and moral strength, she turns her eyes to Ireland, and we learn from the London Daily Telegraph that Mr. Churchill's scheme of recruiting at Queenstown may furnish "matter for congratulation, as Irish boys make excellent bluejackets, happy of disposition, amenable to discipline and extremely quick and handy."

As I can recall an article in this same journal, written during the course of the Boer War, in which Ireland was likened to a "serpent whose head must be crushed beneath the heel," the Daily Telegraph's praise to-day of the Irish disposition should leave Irish boys profoundly unmoved—and still ashore.

There is yet another aspect of the growing stream of British emigration. "Death removes the feeble, emigration removes the strong. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, have no use for the sick and palsied, or for those incapable of work through age or youth. They want the workers, and they get them. Those who have left the United Kingdom during 1912 arc not the scum of our islands, but the very pick. And they leave behind, for our politicians to grapple with, a