The Crime Against Europe Part 10

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 a.n.a.logy 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d'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" a.s.semblies 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 a.s.sails.

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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.suredly 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 oak.u.m 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 sh.o.r.e 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!