United Kingdom and France but also of the United States and Germany itself have collaborated in a reasoned examination of the issues at stake, is at our disposal. The evidence in the whole case is indeed at once so clear and so voluminous that one might well have supposed any further survey of it to be superfluous. That is not so. It is a far from frequent experience to find a man in Ireland, even among those who assume to themselves a new leadership of opinion, who has made an honest study of documents within reach of all the world. You will still hear “intellectuals” explaining at length that they “don’t believe the Germans committed any atrocities in Belgium.” You will hear facile sneers at the notion that attacks of Great Powers on small nationalities had anything to do with the war. The sooner the unworthiness of this familiar attitude is recognised by everybody in Ireland the better. No man has the right to offer an opinion on any subject that is a matter of evidence until he has read the evidence. Upon anyone who has read it in this instance the twin _niaiseries_ just cited make the impression merely of blank unreason. What would one make of a man, and a writer to boot, who began modern French history by dismissing the alleged existence of Napoleon with a shrug and a gibe? Or who “didn’t believe” that there ever were evictions in Ireland? The parallel is exact. The evidence in proof of the first pair of propositions differs from that in proof of the second pair only in being fresher and more abundant. Going upon that evidence, any branch of which can be pursued in detail by any enquirer, I propose to establish this following argument. This war originated in an attempt by Austria-Hungary, a large Empire, to destroy the independence of Serbia, a small nation. It grew to its present dimensions because Germany, and under German pressure Austria-Hungary, rejected every proposal making for peace suggested by the present Allied Powers but especially by the United Kingdom through Sir Edward Grey. Germany offered bribes to the United Kingdom, and to Belgium herself, to induce them to consent to a violation of the European treaty which protected Belgian independence and enforced Belgian neutrality. Having broken like an armed burglar into Belgium, Germany was there guilty of a systematic campaign of murder, pillage, outrage, and destruction, justified, planned and ordered by her military and intellectual leaders. Such a campaign was inherent in her philosophy of politics, and of war. She stood for the gospel of force; and the sacrament of cruelty. To link with her in any wise a nation like Ireland that has always stood for spiritual freedom is an act of treason and blasphemy against our whole past.