Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/93



Every man born in Ireland holds a "hereditary brief" for the opponents of English sway, wherever they may be. The tribunal of history in his own land is closed to him; he must appeal to another Court; he must seek the ear of those who make history elsewhere. The Irishman is denied the right of having a history, as he is denied the right of having a country. He must recover both. For him there is to be no past, any more than a future. And if he seeks the record of his race in the only schools or books open to him he will find that hope has been shut out of the school and fame taken out of the story.

The late John Richard Green, one of the greatest of English historians was attracted to Ireland by a noble sympathy for the fallen he shared with very few of his countrymen. We are told that he sympathised with the spirit of Irish nationality.

"A State," he would say, "is accidental; it can be made or unmade; but a nation is something real which can be neither made or destroyed."

He had once planned a history of Ireland, "but abandoned the idea because the continuous record of misery and misgovernment was too painful to contemplate." "The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told." All pleasure lies in contrast. The history of Ireland offers no contrast; it is a tale of unmitigated wrong.

It is too full of graves, and the ghosts are not laid yet. As well write the history of a churchyard. Forty years before John Richard Green thus explained why he had abandoned the plan of the graveyard, Victor Hugo lashed the front of England with this very thong. "Ireland turned into a cemetery; Poland transported to Siberia;