Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/96

 90 Substitute "India" for "Ireland" and the Grattan of 1780 becomes the Indian patriot of to-day.

"I never will be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking in his rags; he may be naked, he shall not be in irons; and I do see the time is at hand; the spirit is gone forth, the declaration is planted; and though great men should apostasize, yet the cause will live; and though the public speaker should die, yet the immortal lire shall outlast the organ which conveyed it, and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man will not die with the prophet, but survive him."

Were Ireland to accept the bribe now offered she would indeed justify the reproach of Wilfrid Blunt: but she Avould become something else than "a weapon of offence in England's hands against the freedom of the world elsewhere;" she would share, and rightly share, the fate of the parasite growth that, having gripped her trunk so tightly, has by that aid reached the sunlight. The British Empire is no northern oak tree. It is a creeping, climbing plant that has fastened on the limbs of others and grown great from a sap not its own. If we seek an analogy for it in the vegetable and not in the animal world we must go to the forests of the tropics and not to the northern woodlands. In the great swamps at the mouth of the Amazon, the naturalist Bates describes a monstrous liana, the "Sipo Matador," or Murdering Creeper, that far more fitly than the oak tree of the north typifies John Bull and the place he has won in the sunlight by the once strong limbs of Ireland.

Speaking of the forests around Pará, Bates says:—"In these tropical forests each plant and tree seems to be striving to outvie its fellows, struggling upwards towards light and air—branch and leaf and stem—regardless of its neighbors. Parasitic plants are seen fastening