THE ELSEWHERE EMPIRE
Every man born in Ireland holds a "hereditary brief" for the opponents
of English sway, wherever they may be. The tribunal of history in his
own land is closed to him; he must appeal to another court; he must
seek the ear of those who make history elsewhere. The Irishman is
denied the right of having a history, as he is denied the right of
having a country. He must recover both. For him there is no past any
more than a future. And if he seeks the record of his race in the only
schools or books open to him he will find that hope has been shut out
of the school and fame taken out of the story.
The late John Richard Green, one of the greatest of English
historians, was attracted to Ireland by a noble sympathy for the
fallen which he shared with very few of his fellow-countrymen. We
are told that he sympathized with the spirit of Irish nationality. "A
State," he would say, "is accidental; it can be made or unmade; but a
nation is something real which can be neither made nor destroyed."
He had once planned a history of Ireland, "but abandoned the idea
because the continuous record of misery and misgovernment was too
painful to contemplate." All pleasure lies in contrast. The history of
Ireland offers no contrast; it is a tale of unmitigated wrong.
It is too full of graves and the ghosts are not laid yet. As well
write the history of a churchyard. Forty years before John Richard
Green thus explained why he had abandoned the plan of the graveyard,
Victor Hugo lashed the front of England with this very thong. "Ireland
turned into a cemetery; Poland transported to Siberia; all Italy a
galleys--there is where we stand in this month of November, 1831!"
The history of Ireland remains to be written, because the purpose of
Ireland remains yet to be achieved. The widow of John Richard Green
has laid the foundations of that temple of hope in which the youth
of Ireland must enter and be sworn to the task that yet remains for
Irishmen to accomplish.
And so in closing the days of 1913 I bring, with a message of hope,
these scattered thoughts upon the British Empire and its approaching
dissolution to lay before the youth of Ireland. I say approaching
dissolution advisedly, for the signs are there to be read. "Home Rule"
will not save it. The attempt now being made to bribe Ireland and the
greater Ireland beyond the seas, to the side of the Elsewhere Empire
by what has been aptly termed a "ticket-of-leave" bill, will not
suffice. The issue lies in stronger hands. Even could the two Irelands
be won by the dole now offered, of a subordinate Parliament in Dublin,
its hands tied so that it must be impotent for any national effort,
"a Parliament" as Mr. Herbert Samuel says, "for the local affairs of
Irishmen," there are other and more powerful agencies that no measure
of conciliation within the Empire can permanently win to that system
of world exploitation centred in London.
"I would let the Irish have Home Rule," said recently Mr. Winston
Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." But the last word came
from Lord Morley, the "father of Home Rule." "Give it them," he said,
in friendly, private counsel, "give it them; let them have the full
savour of their own dunghill civilization."
But the last word of all will come, not from Lord Morley, or "Home
Rule," but from the land and the myriad peoples whose ancient
civilization, Lord Morley, like every preceding Viceroy, has striven
to bury under the dunghill of British supremacy in India, and to
hide the very outlines of the ancient body of the set designs of a
new purpose. 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
350,000,000 of Indian mankind can never be, 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 life time of many of us, in that greater Ireland England
holds in the eastern seas by the very same tide of raid, conquest and
spoliation that has given her our own land.
Substitute India for Ireland and the Grattan of 1780 becomes the
Indian patriot of to-day.
"I will never 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
has 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 fire shall outlast the organ
which conveyed it, and the breath of liberty, like the word of holy
men, will not die with the prophet, but survive him."
Were Ireland to accept the bribe now offered she would indeed justify
the reproach of Wilfred Blunt; but she would become some thing 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 northland 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 round Para, 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 neighbours. Parasitic plants are seen
fastening with firm grip on others, making use of them with reckless
indifference as instruments for their own advancement. Live and let
live is clearly not the maxim taught in these wildernesses. There is
one kind of parasitic tree very common near Para which exhibits this
feature in a very prominent manner. It is called the "Sipo Matador,"
or Murderer Liana. It belongs to the fig order, and has been described
and figured by Von Martius as the Atlas to Spix and Martius' Travels.
I observed many specimens. _The base of its stem would be unable
to bear the weight of the upper growth_; it is obliged therefore
to support itself on a tree of _another species_. In this it is not
essentially different from other climbing trees and plants, but the
way the Matador sets about it is peculiar and produces certainly a
disagreeable impression. It springs up close to the tree on which it
intends to fix itself, and the wood of its stem grows by spreading
itself like a plastic mould over one side of the trunk of its
supporter. It then puts forth, from each side, an armlike branch,
which grows rapidly, and looks as though a stream of sap were flowing
and hardening as it went. This adheres closely to the trunk of the
victim, and the two arms meet at the opposite side and blend together.
These arms are put forth at somewhat regular intervals in mounting
upwards, and the victim, when its strangler is full grown, becomes
tightly clasped by a number of inflexible rings. These rings gradually
grow larger as the Murderer flourishes, rearing its crown of foliage
to the sky mingled with that of its neighbour, and in course of time
they kill it, by stopping the flow of its sap. The strange spectacle
now remains of the selfish parasite clasping in its arms the lifeless
and decaying body of its victim, which had been a help to its own
growth. Its ends have been served--it has flowered and fruited,
reproduced and disseminated its kind; and _now when the dead trunk
moulders away its own end approaches; its support is gone and itself
also falls_."
The analogy is almost the most perfect in literature, and if we would
not see it made perfect in history we must get rid of the parasite
grip before we are quite strangled. If we would not share the coming
darkness we must shake off the murderer's hold, before murderer and
victim fall together. That fall is close at hand. A brave hand may yet
cut the "Sipo Matador," and the slayer be slain before he has quite
stifled his victim.
If that hand be not a European one, then may it come, bronzed, keen,
and supple from the tropic calm! The birds of the forest are on the
wing.
Regions Caesar never knew, including Hibernia, have come under the
eagles, nay the vultures, of imperial Britain. But the lion's maw is
full.
At length the overgorged beast of prey, with all the diseases in his
veins that over-eating brings, finds that his claws are not so sharp
as they were, that his belly is much heavier when he tries to leap and
that it is now chiefly by his voice he still scares his enemies.
The Empire of England dates from Tudor times. Henry VIII was the first
John Bull. When the conquered Irish and the wealth derived from their
rich country England set out to lay low every free people that had
a country worth invading and who, by reasons of their non-imperial
instinct were not prepared to meet her on equal terms. India she
overran by the same methods as had given her Ireland.
Wholesale plunder, treachery and deceit met at her council board
under a succession of Governors and Viceroys, whose policy was that of
Captain Kidd, and whose ante-room of state led every native prince to
the slippery plank. The thing became the most colossal success upon
earth. No people were found able to withstand such a combination. How
could peoples still nursed in the belief of some diviner will ruling
men's minds resist such an 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 Imperialists 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 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 rôles 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!
End of Project Gutenberg's The Crime Against Europe, by Roger Casement