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 oakum 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 shore 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.