Right
O'CONNELL'S, January 30, 1915
England And Her Part In The Present War
Of making many books upon the present stupendous war in Europe there is no end. Our magazines, periodicals, and daily press teem with news: historical and philosophical articles, relating to the war. The eyes of the world are turned steadfastly on Europe. Neutral as well as belligerent have been drawn to or into the vortex. This writer tells us that the chief cause of the war was the ever- increasing thirst of France to avenge the theft of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871; another sets forth the deep-seated purpose of the Russian Bear to sun himself in peace at Constantinople; again we read that the war blood of Alaric has been boiling for years in the arteries of the kaiser and the German people that they would cross the Alps and annex Italy-would absorb the puny Balkan states and Turkey in their onward march into Asia and a world empire!
And the supersensitive Englishman says he could not suffer the brutal betrayal of Belgian neutrality. England has presented her "white papers" to the world, wherein she sets forth her diplomatic correspondence just prior to the outbreak of the war. and whereby she would prove how she struggled for peace; Germany offers her "white papers" for the same purpose.
EXCUSES AND APOLOGIES These and many similar excuses. apolo- gies and inevitable causes" flood neutral countries. appealing for their moral support. Every student of history knows that these "'causes" are for the most part puerile. superficial, temporary expedients. As boys and girls we were taught in school that slavery was the cause of our Civil war, and it took us many years to learn that aristocracy and democracy, climate and soil, agricultural and manufacturing pursuits, the invention of the cotton-gin, the tariff. the acquisition of new territory, were the real fundamental causes of the war, which the match of slavery ignited.
The unbiased historian of the future will develop the real causes of the present war in Europe and when he does he will lay the burden of blame at the door of England. While England has long since abandoned the doctrine of the divine right of kings she has never for a moment abandoned the doctrine that "might makes right," and that under "this buckler of the people's cause" she has been divinely appointed to gobble the earth and the fullness thereof. Justifying her greed. under this specious plea or that. she has crept into first one nation and then another like a thief in the night, till today she rules one- 'Afth of the habitable globe--and boasts that the sun never sets upon her domains.
By what right? By the right of craft, cunning, greed and violence. England has been the road hog, the commercial pirate. the homestead jumper of the world, for the last 400 years. And now like every successful burglar, after looting the world and planting
By WILLIAM P. REYNOLDS
her batteries at every strategic point. she holds up her hands, reeking with the blood of every people under the sun, and rolls her hypocritical eyes to heaven and prays, "Let us have peace!" With a naval power twice that of Germany she pleads with the kaiser to limit his armaments! Why? Sim- ply that she may be mistress of the seas the world's policeman-that she may enjoy her ill-gotten gains without fear of a right- eous vengeance. Who says the English have
no sense of humor?
ENGLAND'S POLICY
She
A running glance at English history proves these statements ad nauseam. went into India, the garden of the world, by craft, then with the bayonet, and finally with opium in one hand and the Bible in the other. Dreamy India soothed her cap- tivity with the fumes of the drug, but repu- diated the Bible that came with the sword. From 1774 when Warren Hastings began his nefarious spoliation of India the natives suffered their subjection to English rule till 1857 when came the Sepoy mutiny, at the close of which these enlightened Christian rulers lashed the leading Sepoys with their backs across the mouths of English cannon and blew them into the orthodox hell of "Merrie Old England." After 140 years of civil and military administration in India what has England to show the world? The cradle of the human race, the womb of the world's religions, has been given over to spoliation and abortion to fill the coffers of Threadneedle street.
In 1704 Sir George Rooke with "unscru- pulous patriotism" stole the rock of Gibraltar, after Charles the III had fairly won it. Greedy England. quickly realizing that it was the key to all the Mediterranean states. "was both unprincipled enough to sanction and ratify the occupation, and ungrateful enough to leave unrewarded the general," who by his perfidy and treachery had seized it.
When Said Pasha, viceroy of Egypt, had granted a concession to De Lesseps to dig the Suez canal, and he had begun that great work. who schemed, connived and plotted to hinder. delay, and block the undertaking? Who brought pressure to bear on the Sublime Porte of Turkey not to give his consent to the construction of the canal? Who inveigled the native labor away from the work and then rejoiced that "poor De Lesseps must go to the wall?" Who voted in parliament "that the power and influence of the country should be employed in obliging the sultan to withhold his consent?" England, always England! And when in spite of all obstacles and treachery the canal was constructed, who gobbled it? England!
"CUNNING PHILANTHROPY.""
Who then came forward with cunning philanthropy and loaned money to Egypt?
And who then ostensibly sent her troops into Egypt to collect these loans, but in reality to possess and keep this ancient granary of the world, and thus still further strengthen her rights in the Suez canal? England! England. the buccaneer of the acas, the spoiler of nations.
Foreigners principally British foreign- ers between 1880 and 1900, who had come into South Africa were not satisfied with the rights of burghership the laws govern- ing the right of franchise. The country of the Dutch republics had been reclaimed from The Boers wild beasts and still wilder men. had fought their way, mile by mile, into the trackless veldt, the rugged mountains, and had carved out homes, and a government for a peace-loving, contented people. They justly resented the foreign influx, and the demands which would give the absolute control of their national life. Consequently in 1896 Cecil Rhodes, the English premier of the Cape, sent Dr. Jamieson, with his mounted English police, on that despicable raid into the Transvaal.
It failed. The
civilized world condemned the raid as an outrage, yet England left Cecil Rhodes unpunished, still allowed him his seat in the privy council, and continued his chartered
company.
Four years later, without just cause or right, inspired only by greed of gold and lust of empire, she marched an army of her mighty realms against this unoffending, peace- loving, contented and industrious people, sacked and burned their homes, devastated their fields and razed their towns, waged a bitter and cruel war against Boer forces, in whose ranks stood grizzled burghers, gray haired women, and children, fighting for their homes, their liberty, and their native land. When Lord Roberts raised the British flag in Pretoria, he but drove another nail into the coffin of the English empire.
And so we might speak of her treatment of Denmark in 1801 and 1807; of the treach ery of her much-lauded duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, who was dancing at Brussels while good old Blucher was form- ing his little army to meet the onslaught of Napoleon; or how with direct and charac- teristic brutality she attacked China, in the "Opium war," that she might get plenty of this drug to lull her subjects in India to sleep, and how finally, with her land and naval forces, she wrested Hongkong from China, and forced Canton, Amoy. Shanghai, Fuchow and Ningpo to do business with the English East India company, or its successor, the English government.
"STIRRING UP OF STRIFE."
To whatsoever part of the world we turn we witness the same measureless treachery and violence, the stirring up of strife, that during the squabble, melee, or war, England may walk in and gobble some coveted prize.
O'CONNELL'S, January 30, 1915
The whole civilized world should indict this British imperialism that has stalked rampant through every weak nation of the globe, trampling upon native religions, customs, culture, and patriotism, with an insatiate greed for gold and a lust for empire.
She has been tried in the balance and found wanting in her colonies and depend. encies. For years there has been evidence of their earnest desire to throw off her galling yoke. The recent troubles in Ire- land, the present uprisings of the Boers, are but fitting illustrations that predict the future. Her thick-headed
"governmental
classes," her arrogant, greedy, unsympathetic
ministers, will eventually alienate her depend- encies as her Norths and Granvilles alienated her American colonies and drove them into rebellion.
The present war in Europe is in the last analysis a war between Germany and England, The issues which Russia and France have thrown into the struggle are trivial when
with compared
the fundamental actuating Germany and England.
causes
Cooped up in a territory smaller than the state of Texas are 60,000,000 of Germans. Hemmed in by the Baltic and North seas. the plains of Poland, the mountains on her southern and eastern borders, and by Belgium and the Netherlands on the west, this mighty nation. conscious of its power, its wealth. its wonderful strides in the arts and sciences. industrial and agricultural pursuits. yearly pulsating with ever increasing pressure against its borders, from the teeming swelling life within, descended from an empire that ruled western Europe before England and France had put on their national swaddling clothes this nation can see no just cause why England should possess one-fifth of the habitable globe, while Germany suffers with growing pains within her limited confines.
England wrested from Holland, Spain and France in turn the mastery of the seas. and commercial supremacy. A new nation now challenges that supremacy, and therein lies the basic cause of the present war. with its roots running far back into European history.
¡
for our moral most skilled over here to
In this deep-seated and far reaching antagonism England comes to the United States begging, pleading, support. She has sent her financier, Sir George Paish, hobnob with Wall street. She has depu tized some of her most able writers to come to this country and pen columns of fulsome flattery about the American people -their mighty power, inexhaustible wealth, wonder- ful individuality. high-power progression, and even hinting at our culture and refine- ment. Shall we yield to Caesar the things that belong to God? If England is entitled to our moral support, then there is a moral obligation on our part to render it.
Morals are traditional, practical, idealistic. "Blood is thicker than water." "The Anglo-Saxon nations are bound by a common speech, common customs, ethical and political aspirations to stand together," says the idealistic moralist. But nations
or
Page Nine
ever have been and ever will be, while human to throw the house slops on the front of the nature remains as it is, actuated rather by load and the ashes on the rear. If Greeley traditional and practical morality. Measured is like the rest of the "experts" that have by this latter standard is England entitled been inflicted on us, his chattels will stay in to our moral support? Her oppression and "hawk" until he loses them by default. It tyranny toward our colonies from the found is indeed a sad case, but why in the name ing of Jamestown to the cooping up of Corn- of Sam Hill could he not have been made some kind of an assistant director of the wallis at Yorktown by the French and Amer- icans; her impressment of American citizens bureau of agriculture? Is this bureau really into her naval service that led to the war loaded up with junk and unable to take cn of 1812; her evil wishes, treacherous machi- more? Where will they put census expert nations, subscriptions to Confederate loans, Col. Johnston if the legislature fails to pess hostile speeches in parliament, building of the necessary appropriation for census work? the Alabama and other ironclads which were Really it is very bad.
fitted out in her harbors and sent forth to prey upon and destroy the ships of the loyal citizens of this country, after she had declared her neutrality, in our Civil war; her bold attempt to filch from us this very state of Washington: her constant sneers, cynicism, taunts, and insults not only to our form of government and our laws, but to anything and everything American, that have appeared in the books of her authors, and in her daily press, ever since our Civil war down to the breaking out of the present European war these and many similar acts on the part of England toward this country answer the question whether traditional and practical morality calls upon us now to give her our moral support.
Is it for the benefit of humanity for our own moral and material benefit that we ethically uphold the hands of this robber of nations. that she may be strengthened in her grasp upon one-fifth of the habitable globe? Her orators, exhorting a decadent nation to arms, have already begun to cast lots over the spoils of war. Alsace and Lorraine are to be given to France, Russia is, perhaps, to be strengthened in the Balkans on her way to Constantinople, the naval forces of the kaiser are to be wiped off the seas, Belgium is to be reimbursed and rehabilitated as an outside guard for England's southern shore, and the German people are to be relegated to a quiet, pastoral life with the privilege of exporting their few products in British bottoms!
We have wisely proclaimed our neutral- ity in the present war. Let us keep it in good faith, and not in treachery, as did England her neutrality in our Civil war. Our people are conglomerate, and naturally some sympathize with one nation, some with another, but we are all Americans, and loyalty to our own country, loyalty to humanity, forbids that we give moral support to that nation which is seeking to crush Germany. to that nation whose whole history in dealing with other nations smells to heaven of craft, greed, and violence, to that nation who fought us with mercenaries, and is now sum- moning her satraps, her heathen hordes, to the slaughter of the German people, one of the foremost products of modern civilization.
A SAD CASE
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