Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/89

 Rh warrant "as a new weapon of offence in England's hands against the freedom of the world elsewhere."

The Irishman, who in the belief that Home Rule has come or that any measure of Home Rule the London Parliament will offer can be a substitute for his country's freedom, joins the British army or navy is a voluntary traitor to his country. His place is to prepare for the coming of the German. His place is to see that when a victorious Germany severs Ireland from her hereditary exploiter the difficulties of settlement shall be resolutely faced by a people determined to justify the freedom conferred upon them. Even were Germany all that Englishmen paint her and Irishmen only to change "owners," the change could not but be beneficial to Ireland. Germany took Alsace-Lorraine by force from France in 1870, and has governed those provinces for forty years by what is termed "brute force" and against the will of the majority. Yet forty years of German "tyranny" have brought extraordinary prosperity. Strassburg, a mean, pent-in garrison town under France, has become a great and beautiful city under the Germans, and the population of the whole annexed territory has greatly increased in the period. Ireland in the same forty years of English civilization has lost nearly one-fifth of her population. Her pauper rate, her lunacy rate, her sick rate—consumption particularyparticularly [sic]—have all gone up; her vitality has gone down. Her ports, save one, lie idle; her rivers empty. Every way out lies only through and across Britain.

Almost everything that Ireland produces, or consumes, must all go out or come in solely through England and on payment of a transit and shipping tax to English trade.

The London press has lately waxed indignant over Servia denied by Austria a port on the Adriatic, and we have been told that a Servia without a port is a Servia