The analogy 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 space 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.