On the occasion of the first council meeting of the League of Nations which, according to
an official communique, must take place in the Foreign office in Paris, today, January 16th [1920], the representatives of the elected Government of the Irish Republic in Paris, come with this letter, to deposit, in the name of Ireland, a formal and solemn protest against the deceptive semblance of the international peace League, that is, the actual League of Nations.
Ireland is one of the most ancient nations and has, for centuries, been the centre from
which the light of the Occident radiated, and is today, among the European Nations, the
only one, possessing so many noble titles, to endure a foreign yoke; Ireland, which
ardently desires to co-operate in full in establishing a League with a world-wide authority
founded upon Justice and Liberty, makes her opposition heard to the would-be League of
Nations as it is conceived and established today, on the following grounds:
1. Because this League is an instrument of imperialism, fated to assure and perpetuate the
English hegemony in the two hemispheres.
2. Because it constitutes a movement of English hypocrisy under which thousands of men whom
she has consecrated to servitude would be buried.
3. Because in its capacity of world aeropage it doesn't have any authority nor sufficient
sanctions; because it is deceptive and partial and its constitution is based upon English
preconceived ideas against the enemies and victims of England and its functioning is
dominated by English influences.
4. Because the great United States of America is indignant and keeps away from and
repudiates it.
The actual organisation of this English brand of League reveals a subtle plan imagined by
England to obtain from the other governments a moral sanction for the pretentious English
to maintain under English yoke people and territories who, in former times and today, by
devious ways or by bloody conquest England knew how to enlarge her empire.
Thanks to her secret conventions and her diplomatic grudges, England has written the
complicated pact of the League of Nations in such a way as to prevent a nation which is not
actually recognised as being free and independent from obtaining liberty by recourse to
arbitration in the League of Nations.
The conditions of the pact are skillfully adapted to the needs of every force interested in
postponing claims, how soever justified they might be, of any subject nation.
This League which has a pretention to represent a great and all powerful world-wide peace
instrument is, on the contrary, conceived in a way that makes it one of the most fatal
agents in all history to disturb the peace and to arouse war; it threatens the whole world
by covering inequities with its coat of justice.
Already by a moral sanction of which England is availing herself - the League of Nations
shares with England the responsibility of the bloody revolts and anarchy which ravages so
many countries.
It is the same in Ireland where an English Army of occupation, 100,000 strong, lead a
campaign of terror and violence; in Egypt, where the revolution against English usurpation
is very strong; in India where the resistance to English tyranny showed itself so menacing
that the English troops recently went as far as to machine-gun for ten minutes a compact
crowd of unarmed demonstrators. [The Amritzer massacre]
We cannot acknowledge this League the right to be considered as a instrument of peace;
events in Ireland already prove that it is an instrument of war. We protest against this
audacious deception which deprives the world of a serious and impartial international
League which President Wilson advocated after a war in which the liberation of small
nations and the annihilation of militarism were the avowed goals.
For these reasons, and in the name of our country in which the secular struggle is an
example and a hope for all the oppressed nations of the world, we believe we must make
representation to the imperialist governments that the League of Nations should not keep
the shape that England has given it; we are appealing to all those who prefer the rights
of the people over secret diplomacy to help us to expose the actual character of the League
of Nations and to transform it. We demand the establishment of a democratic League of
Nations based on principles of justice and liberty, of a League with the power of
arbitration to which subject nations will be able to recourse with the certitude that
justice will be delivered unto them.
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