Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/99

Rh such a combination. How could peoples still nursed in the belief of some diviner will ruling men's minds resist such attack?

For one brief space Napoleon reared his head; and had he cast his vision to Ireland instead of to Egypt he would have found out the secret of the Pirate's Stronghold. But the fates willed otherwise; the time was not yet. He sailed for Alexandria, lured by a dream, instead of for Cork; and the older Imperialists beat the new Imperialist and secured a fresh century of unprecedented triumph. The Pyramids looked down on Waterloo; but the headlands of Bantry Bay concealed the mastery, and the mystery, of the seas.

With 1815 was born the Era of Charles Peace, no less than of John Bull— on Sundays and Saint's days a Churchwarden, who carried the plate; on week days a burglar who lifted it. Truly, as John Mitchel said on his convict hulk, “On English felony the sun never sets.” May it set in 1915!

From Napoleon's downfall to the battle of Colenso, the Empire founded by Henry VIII has swelled to monstrous size. Innumerable free peoples have bit the dust and died with plaintive cry to heaven. The wealth of London has increased a thousand fold, and the giant hotels and caravauserais have grown, at the millionaire's touch, to rival the palaces of the Caesars.

“All's well with God's world”—and poet and plagiarist, courtier and courtesan, Kipling and cant— these now dally by the banks of the Thames and dine off the peoples of the earth, just as once the degenerate populace of imperial Rome fed upon the peoples of the Pyramids. But the thing is near the end. The “secret of Empire” is no longer the sole possession of England. Other peoples are learning to think imperially. The Goths and the Visigoths of modern civilization are upon the horizon. Action must soon follow thought. London, like Rome, will have strange