2 Quotes & Sayings By Roger Casement
Roger Casement was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 26th May 1864. He was the eldest son of a family of eight, and his father was a prosperous builder and contractor. Casement's education was supplied by a private tutor in his early childhood, but from the ages of eleven to twenty-one he attended the Christian Brothers School at Hackney in London. In 1880 Casement left school and went to live with his uncle in New York City
He worked as a clerk in a commission house for three months, but he found that he could not live in a place where he could not speak the language. He became a travelling salesman, visiting the homes of farmers in New York State and Canada to sell their produce. In 1885 he returned to England and worked as a clerk for various firms in Liverpool and Manchester before taking up work with the American Express Company.
In 1888 Casement won an open scholarship from Trinity College, Dublin after writing an essay about John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Casement also read political economy at night at Trinity College while working full time for American Express. After serving an apprenticeship with P&O Lines, he moved to China for a year to join the China Inland Mission, where he met Florence Balcombe who later became his wife.
In November 1889 he sailed for America with CIM. His first job was as a bookkeeper until 1890 when he was sent by CIM to study Chinese at Harvard University. From there he moved to Japan where he spent three years giving lectures on political economy and other subjects which were well received by the Japanese people.
He moved back to America in 1894 and studied law for two years at Harvard before becoming involved with CIM again and travelling throughout Canada and the United States speaking on behalf of the Irish cause and advocating Irish independence from Great Britain. He lectured against imperialism and military might that we should support international arbitration over war between nations—a view that led him into trouble with officials of the British government. He returned to Ireland where he married Florence Balcombe in 1896; they had one son together before she died of tuberculosis in 1900.
Their second child, Margaret (Molly), was born two years later; Molly would suffer from mental illness her entire life. In 1904 Casement joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and helped organise an uprising against British rule in Ireland called "the Easter Rebellion." The rebellion did not go according to plan and resulted in 1,800 deaths (including Casement