Why Casement went to Germany

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ONE PENNY. WHY CASEMENT WENT TO GERMANY. By SIR ROGER CASEMENT. From the "Evening Mail" (New York), August 10th, 1916. An article written by the Irish patriot just before he left Germany on his ill-fated trip to England. I have read so many explanations by others why I went to Germany that a word from myself may not be inappropriate. Since the responsibility for my action is my own, I am the person best fitted to tell the reasons for my action. In June, 1913, I resigned from the British consular service on the ground of ill-health, my intention being to go to South Africa, where both climate and surroundings were congenial. Unhappily the political condition of Ireland claimed consideration from me as an Irishman, since I had always been something more than a Home Ruler in feeling, although I had never taken an active part in politics. My views as an Irish Nationalist of this type were well known in the British Foreign Office, and in England as much as in Ireland, for I never made any concealment of them. I had stated them openly on many occasions in the press and they were known to the British Government as fully as to my own friends. Preparatory (as I thought) to going out to the Cape for a period of repose and quiet, within which to place on record my African and Amazon experiences in the field of tropical research, I decided to spend the autumn of 1913 in Ireland to pay some farewell visits. As matters turned out I found it very hard to leave Ireland. The Carson campaign in Ulster was then in full blast, and despite an innate and ever-recurring desire for retirement, I found myself overborne by the solicitations of my friends to stay at home, for a time at any rate. In Ulster, where I was most at home, I tried to keep together the small band of "scattered Protestants" there who desired friendship with their Catholic fellow countrymen, based on an equal recognition of their common Irish identity, against which the forces of intolerance and enmity were openly arrayed. The Irish Volunteers. In this effort I took part throughout the autumn and close of 1913. In November of that year came the establishment of the Irish Volunteers at Dublin. The Irish Volunteers sought to do for all Ireland what the Ulster Volunteers sought for Ulster Protestantism alone - to defend the rights and liberties common to a whole people - Protestant and Catholic. I joined Prof. MacNeill and became a member of the governing body of the Volunteers, and with him addressed the first meetings held, after the inaugural Dublin meeting, in Galway and Cork, in December, 1913. An incident at this time occurred that added weight to the conviction I already held, that no English Government whether it called itself Whig or Tory, was capable of treating Ireland with justice. I refer to the abandonment of the port of Queenstown by the large Cunard vessel on the alleged ground of its dangerous character, and the subsequent action taken against the Hamburg-American line, which had announ…