Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/94

 88 all Italy a galleys—there is where we stand in this month of November 1831!"

The history of Ireland remains to be written, because the purpose of Ireland remains yet to be achieved. The widow of John Richard Green has laid the foundations of that temple of hope in which the youth of Ireland must enter and be sworn to the task that yet remains for Irishmen to accomplish.

And so in these opening days of 1914 I bring, with a message of hope, these scattered thoughts upon the British Empire and its approaching dissolution to lay before the youth of Ireland. I say approaching dissolution advisedly, for the signs are there to be read. "Home Rule" will not save it. The attempt now being made to bribe Ireland and the Greater Ireland beyond the seas, to the side of the Elsewhere Empire by what has been aptly termed a ticket-of-leave bill will not suffice. The issue lies in stronger hands. Even could the two Irelands be won by the dole now offered of a subordinate Parliament in Dublin, its hands tied so that it must be impotent for any national effort, "a Parliament," as Mr. Herbert Samuel says, "for the local affairs of Irishmen," there are other and more powerful agencies that no measure of "conciliation within the Empire" can permanently win to that system of world exploitation centred in London.

"I would let the Irish have Home Rule," said recently Mr. Winston Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." But the last word came from Lord Morley, the "father of Home Rule." "Give it them," he said, in friendly, private counsel, "give it them; let them have the full savour of their own dunghill civilization."

But the last word of all will come, not from Lord Morley or "Home Rule," but from the land and the myriad peoples whose ancient civilization, Lord Morley, like every precedent Satrap, has striven to bury under