Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/91

 Rh of ours: "Of the Second Army Corps (of the British army) two divisions and one brigade of cavalry are quartered in Ireland, of which at any rate the larger part will remain there in order to prevent a rising of the Irish to whom the German invasion would bring the liberty they long for." (Von Edelsheim, in his pamphlet Operationen über See.)

We must see to it that what Thierry wrote of our fathers is not shamefully belied by their sons. Our "indomitable persistency" has up to this excelled and subdued the unvarying will applied to one unvarying purpose of those who, by dint of that quality, have elsewhere subjugated the Universe. We who have preserved through centuries of misery, the remembrance of lost liberty, are not now going to merge our unconquered souls in the base body of our oppressor.

One of the few liberal statesmen England has produced, certainly the only liberal politician she has ever produced, the late Mr. Gladstone, compared the Union between Great Britain and Ireland to "the union between the mangled corpse of Hector and the headlong chariot of Achilles." (1890.)

But, while I cannot admit that England is an Achilles, save, perhaps, that she may be wounded like him in the heel, I will not admit, I will not own that Ireland, however mangled, however "the plowers have ploughed upon her back and made long furrows," is in truth dead, is indeed a corpse. No; there is a juster analogy, and one given us by the only Englishman who was in every clime and in every circumstance a Liberal; one who died fighting in the cause of liberty even as in life he sang it. Byron denounced the Union between England and Ireland as "the union of the shark with its prey."

Ireland has been swallowed by the shark, but she has not been digested, she has not yet been assimilated.