The Crime Against Europe: A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914Casement, Roger
History
The Crime Against Europe: A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914
Casement, Roger
Irish question; World War, 1914-1918 -- Causes
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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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