The Crime Against Europe by Roger Casement

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With 1811 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 cries to heaven. The wealth
of London has increased a thousand fold, and the giant hotels and
caravanserais 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 civilisation
are upon the horizon. Action must soon follow thought. London, like
Rome, will have strange guests. They will not pay their hotel bills.
Their day is not yet but it is at hand. "Home Rule" assemblies and
Indian "Legislative Councils" may prolong the darkness; but the dawn
is in die sky. And in the downfall of the Tudor Empire, both Ireland
and India shall escape from the destruction and join again the free
civilizations of the earth.

The birds of the forest are on the wing.

It is an Empire in these straights that turns to America, through
Ireland, to save it. And the price it offers is--war with Germany.
France may serve for a time, but France like Germany, is in Europe,
and in the end it is all Europe and not only Germany England assails.
Permanent confinement of the white races, as distinct from the
Anglo-Saxon variety, can only be achieved by the active support
and close alliance of the American people. These people are to-day,
unhappily republicans and free men, and have no ill-will for Germany
and a positive distaste for imperialism. It is not really in their
blood. That blood is mainly Irish and German, the blood of men not
distinguished in the past for successful piracy and addicted rather to
the ways of peace. The wars that Germany has waged have been wars of
defence, or wars to accomplish the unity of her people. Irish wars
have been only against one enemy, and ending always in material
disaster they have conferred always a moral gain. Their memory uplifts
the Irish heart; for no nation, no people, can reproach Ireland with
having wronged them. She has injured no man.

And now, to-day, it is the great free race of this common origin
of peace-loving peoples, filling another continent, that is being
appealed to by every agency of crafty diplomacy, in every garb but
that of truth, to aid the enemy of both and the arch-disturber of
the old world. The jailer of Ireland seeks Irish-American support
to keep Ireland in prison; the intriguer against Germany would win
German-American good-will against its parent stock. There can be no
peace for mankind, no limit to the intrigues set on foot to assure
Great Britain "the mastery of the seas."

If "America" will but see things aright, as a good "Anglo-Saxon"
people should, she will take her place beside, nay, even a little in
front of John Bull in the plunder of the earth. Were the "Anglo-Saxon
Alliance" ever consummated it would be the biggest crime in human
history. That alliance is meant by the chief party seeking it to be
a perpetual threat to the peoples of Europe, nay, to the whole of
mankind outside the allied ranks. And instead of bringing peace it
must assuredly bring the most distracting and disastrous conflict that
has ever stained the world with blood.

John Bull has now become the great variety artist, one in truth whose
infinite variety detention cannot stale any more than Customs officers
can arrest the artist's baggage.

At one moment the "Shirt King," being prosecuted for the sale of cheap
cottons as "Irish Linen" in London; the next he lands the "Bloater
King" in New York, offering small fish as something very like a whale.
And the offer in both cases is made in the tongue of Shakespeare.

The tongue has infinite uses; from China it sounds the "call for
prayer," and lo, the Book of Dividends opens at the right text. Were
Bull ever caught in the act, and put from the trade of international
opium-dosing to that of picking oakum and the treadmill we should hear
him exclaim, as he went out of sight, "Behold me weaving the threads
of democratic destiny as I climb the golden stair."

The roles are endless! In Ireland, the conversion of Irishmen into
cattle; in England, the conversion of Irish cattle into men; in
India and Egypt the suppression of the native press; in America the
subsidising of the non-native press; the tongue of Shakespeare has
infinite uses. He only poached deer--it would poach dreadnoughts. The
emanations of Thames sewage are all over the world, and the sewers are
running still. The penalty for the pollution of the Thames is a high
one; but the prize for the pollution of the Mississippi is still
higher; the fountains of the deep, the mastery of the great waters,
these are the things John Bull seeks on the shore of the "Father of
Waters."

The sunset of the fading Empire would turn those waters into blood.
The British Empire was not founded in peace; how, then can it be kept
by peace, or ensured by peace-treaties? It was born of pillage and
blood-shed, and has been maintained by both; and it cannot now be
secured by a common language any more than a common Bible. The lands
called the British Empire belong to many races, and it is only by the
sword and not by the Book of Peace or any pact of peace that those
races can be kept from the ownership of their own countries.

The "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" means a compact to ensure slavery and
beget war. The people who fought the greatest war in modern history to
release slaves are not likely to begin the greatest war in all history
to beget slaves.

Let the truth be known in America that England wants to turn the great
Republic of free men into die imperial ally of the great Empire of
bought men, and that day die "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" gives place to the
Declaration of Independence.

The true alliance to aim at for all who love peace is the friendly
Union of Germany, America and Ireland. These are the true United
States of the world.

Ireland, the link between Europe and America, must be freed by both.

Denied to-day free intercourse with either, she yet forms in the great
designs of Providence the natural bond to bring the old world and the
new together.

May 1915 lay the foundation of this--the true Hundred Years of Peace!

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