Page:The issue; the case for Sinn Fein.djvu/7

5 up to hide the truth from oar eyes. We are secretly and systematically robbed and we hardly notice it. The ordinary Irish worker pays at least four shillings a week to England, he is hardly aware of the fact, so nicely is it done whenever he buys tobacco or his wife gets tea and sugar, and so on. Though the average income in England is three times what it is in Ireland, the notoriously underfed Irish workers have to pay more than twice the English proportion of indirect taxes on food, etc. We pay England 1/- on every pound of tea, l£d. on every pound of sugar, 7d. on ever.v oz. of tobacco. There is no fuss about it: it is accepted as part of the laws of nature "that tea should be a shilling a pound dearer than it need be. As for direct taxation—well, even the farmers know what the English income-tax is. Where does it all go? To England as taxes, profits, rents, imperial contributions, and trade. As a going concern Ireland is now worth thirty million a year to its owner, John Bull. There are certain expenses of administration—police, Castle, secret service, prisons, tax collectors—and there are, of course, several items of hush-money, dodges necessary to fool the people, such as "education." But the fact is that a bigger and bigger profit is being made every year out of this island. More agricultural materials and products are shipped to England, more Irish brains are selected for running India, etc., more Irishmen are utilised for gun-fodder. Sometimes, after much beseeching by resolutions and deputations, we are graciously presented with a minute fraction of our own goods. Is it not about time that we recognised in English "grants" our own country's transmuted plunder? We are as dependent on England as a factory is on an absentee society lady who is shareholder.

In 1663 began the long series of English laws against Irish trade. Charles II. closed the English markets to Irish, cattle, meat, leather, butter, etc. Ireland built ships and opened direct trade with Flanders, France, Spain, the American Colonies. The Navigation Act and the Jacobite War once more destroyed our mercantile marine and ruined our industries. Ireland was practically confined by law to the English market. In 1782, 60,000 Volunteers, with arms in their hands, won Free Trade—i.e., the liberty of Ireland to trade direct with the world. In a few years, bad as our own Parliament was, the country prospered exceedingly. The Union once more destroyed our industries- and even our tillage and turned Ireland into a cattle-ranch; our mercantile marine was destroyed. All our trade is in the hands of English middleman and we have to sell and buy at England's price. We are dependent on England, not in the sense that we get anything out of her, but in the sense that we have allowed her to capture our trade and cut us off from the world. We have allowed England to become a parasitic bloodsucker. And because we have done so, we fancy that England is our sole customer. As if the whole world is not clamouring for meat and butter and other foodstuffs! In 1912, when England placed her cattle embargo on Ireland, the prices in the markets of Hamburg and Genoa—after deducting import duty and the extra cost of transit—were more than 11/- per cwt. higher than the price paid in England. Had Irishmen then had enough Sinn Fein spirit, they would soon have, discovered who was dependent on whom!

There is no possible argument, moral or economic, against Irish freedom. "Is Ireland fit to be an independent sovereign nation?" asks Dr. Cohalan, Bishop of Cork. "Why should it not be. if Belgium is fit to be a sovereign nation, if Serbia is so fit, if Montenegro—whose King is not much more than a strong farmer in this country—is fit, all fit to be independent nations? Then, when putting the question as to Ireland. I would really ask everyone, men and women, in this country to cease speaking slightingly of their own race and their own country. I would like every Irishman and woman, Catholic and Protestant, to answer that question in the affirmative." We are fit to be free, we have a God-given right to be free, we mean to be free. But how are we going to get our freedom?