A few more years of peaceful expansion by Germany and the chances of success would be less if not quite gone. Since August, 1911, the sole object of British foreign policy has been to put Germany in a false position and to arrange for the blow to be struck by other hands—by hired hands.
To-day we see the triumph of British diplomacy. Russia and France have been nerved up to the task. The sword has been drawn against Germany, and England, confident now that come what may she must gain her object (the destruction of German sea power, shipping and commerce), enters joyfully into a struggle that while it shall never touch her own shores, or interrupt or lessen a single English meal, must end in the laying waste of Germany and the annihilation of the only European people who had shown themselves capable of serious competition in the peaceful arts of commerce and industry.
In order to achieve this crime England is prepared to hand Europe over to Russia. Herself a non-European Power she cheerfully contemplates Europe dominated by an Asiatic Power, so that she may sweep German commerce from the seas and destroy the constant threat of German peaceful expansion. No greater crime against civilization has ever been planned. Secure herself, as she believes, guarded by the seas and her "invicible" ring of Dreadnoughts, having never experienced the horrors of invasion or herself borne the suffering of war she has plotted and achieved a war of inconceivable horror and devastation abroad, from which she confidently hopes to pull the spoils of a ruined German world commerce.
In this war Germany fights not only for her own life—she fights to free the sees and if she wins she fights to free Ireland. In this war Ireland has only one enemy. Let every Irish heart, let every Irish hand, let every Irish purse be with Germany.
