Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/85

 Rh Ireland: Males. 2,186,802; females. 2,195,147; total, 4,381,951. Excess of females, 8,346.

Ireland, it is seen, can still spare 100,000 or 150,000 males for the British armed forces and be in no unhealthier sex plight than Scotland or England is in. It is to get this surplus of stout Irish brawn and muscle that Mr. Churchill and the British War Office are now touting in Ireland.

I take the following Government advertisement from the Cork Evening Echo (of March. 1913), in illustration:

"NOTICE—Any person that brings a recruit for the Regular or Special Reserve Branches of the Army to the Recruiting Officer at Victoria Barracks, Cork, will be paid the money reward allowed for each recruit, which ranges from 1s. 6d. to 5s. each."

From whatever point of view we survey it we shall find that England's Empire at bottom rests upon Ireland, and requires the continued exploitation of Ireland to make good British deficiencies. The Dominions are far off, and while they may give battleships, they take men. Ireland is close at hand—she gives all and takes nothing. Men, mind, food, and money—all these she has offered through the centuries, and it is upon these and the unrestricted drain of these four things from that rich mine of human fertility and wealth, that the British Empire has been founded and maintained. To secure to-day the goodwill and active co-operation of the Irish race abroad as well as in Ireland, and through that goodwill to secure the Alliance and support of the United States has become the guiding purpose of British statesmanship.

The Home Rule Bill of the present Liberal Government is merely the petty party expression of what all English statesmen recognize as a national need. Were the present Liberal Government thrown out to-morrow their Unionist successors would hasten to bind Ireland (and