Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/95

Rh the dunghill of British supremacy in India, and to hide the very outlines of the ancient body in the set designs of a new purpose.

Civilization has her triumphs of destruction no less than of construction, as the submerged pillars of Philæ attest. In India the task is to obliterate by construction.

The draughtsman now succeeds the storming parties of the past and wipes out with rule and compass what even pillage had spared. The capital of British India is to be "the new Delhi," planned in Whitehall, but paid for in India—the apotheosis of dung. The new India will make short work of "the new Delhi."

"An unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,"' of moral and spiritual separation sets between the imperial conception as nourished in Britain, and the growing hope of the great millions of mankind who make up the greatest realm of her Empire.

Ireland might be bought or bribed, at any rate in this generation, to forfeit her national ideals and barter the aspiration that six centuries of contact with England have failed to kill; but the three hundred and fifty millions of Indian mankind can never be won, or bought, or bribed in the end.

Even if Ireland forgot the deathless words of Grattan, delivered in the subordinate Parliament of 1780, those words will find a response in the hearts of men who never heard of Grattan. For the voice of the Irish patriot was, in truth, a world voice—a summons to every audience wherever men gather in quest of freedom. The prophesy Grattan uttered in the name of Ireland assuredly will be fulfilled, and that in the lifetime of many of us, in that greater Ireland England holds in the Eastern Seas by the very same title of raid, conquest and spoliation that has given her our own land.