the seas were recruited from this slave pen of English civilisation.
During the last 100 years probably 2,000,000 Irishmen have
been drafted into the English fleets and armies from a land
purposely drained of its food. Fully the same number, driven by
executive-controlled famines have given cheap labour to England and
have built up her great industries, manned her shipping, dug her
mines, and built her ports and railways while Irish harbours silted up
and Irish factories closed down. While England grew fat on the crops
and beef of Ireland, Ireland starved in her own green fields and
Irishmen grew lean in the strife of Europe.

While a million Irishmen died of hunger on the most fertile plains
of Europe, English Imperialism drew over one thousand million pounds
sterling for investment in a world policy from an island that was
represented to that world as too poor to even bury its dead. The
profit to England from Irish peonage cannot be assessed in terms of
trade, or finance, or taxation. It far transcends Lord MacDonnell's
recent estimate at Belfast of £320,000,000--"an Empire's ransom," as
he bluntly put it.

Not an Empire's ransom but the sum of an Empire's achievement, the
cost of an Empire's founding, and to-day the chief bond of an Empire's
existence. Detach Ireland from the map of the British Empire and
restore it to the map of Europe and that day England resumes her
native proportions and Europe assumes its rightful stature in the
empire of the world. Ireland can only be restored to the current of
European life, from which she has so long been purposely withheld by
the act of Europe. What Napoleon perceived too late may yet be the
purpose and achievement of a congress of nations. Ireland, I submit,
is necessary to Europe, is essential to Europe, to-day she is retained