Chapter 3

Hatton and Harvey say: "In many of the smaller and more remote settlements successive generations lived and died without education and religious teaching of any kind. The lives of the people were rendered hard and miserable for the express purpose of driving them away. The governors of those days considered that loyalty to England rendered it imperative on them to depopulate Newfoundland."

How did England stand meanwhile towards the other nation, that of France, which had claims on Newfoundland? This country had exercised its right to replace the Bourbons by the republic, just as England had replaced the Stuarts by the Guelphs.

But the Germans and Austrians had insolently interfered in the private affairs of France, and so made a military leader, in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte, absolutely indispensable for the protection of the country against foreign foes.

No sooner was Napoleon seated on the consular throne--he had not then become emperor--than he addressed a letter to King George III., urging the restoration of peace. "The war which has ravaged for eight years the four quarters of the globe, is it," he asks, "to be eternal?" "France and England," he concludes, "may, by the abuse of their strength, still for a time retard the period of their exhaustion; but I will venture to say the fate of all civilized nations is attached to the termination of a war which involves the whole world."

And what did England's Tory king answer? He intrusted the reply to Grenville, who was then the British minister for foreign affairs, and wrote to the Consul Bonaparte that, while his Britannic Majesty did not positively make the restoration of the Bourbons an indispensable condition of peace, nor claim to prescribe to France her form of government, he would intimate that only the one was likely to secure the other, and that he had not sufficient respect for her new ruler to entertain his proposals. Can we wonder that after so insolent a letter the first consul became emperor?

France is quite as proud as England; and the insolence of the Guelph, in presuming to insinuate that her first consul was not as good as he, was quite enough to provoke her into making the consul her emperor, and doing her best to chastise her insulters. Charles James Fox, in Parliament, pronounced the royal answer "odiously and absurdly wrong"; but the squires and borough-mongers of the House of Commons supported the action of the king by a majority of 265 to 64. It is for such infamies as this that Newfoundland has even to-day to bear all the inconveniences of the French claims on their shores. I do not blame the French for insisting that England shall scuttle out of Egypt before she yields her claims in Newfoundland; but it is the responsible English, and not the innocent Newfoundlanders, who ought to pay the cost, and the conduct of England in insisting that Newfoundland shall bear the burden is cowardly and mean beyond all expression.

While the Tories were thus hurling England into war, it is interesting to observe how the Guelphs conducted it. The Duke of York, with a generalship worthy of his family, led an army of British and Russian soldiers into a captivity from which they could only be redeemed by the surrender of prisoners taken on the sea by _real_ Englishmen.

Englishmen were taxed in order to give the German despots money wherewith to fight the French. Austria received for one campaign more money than England had to pay even for the "Alabama" claims, and the czar of Russia received £900,000 for the eight months his troops were in the field. During the same war the king's second son, the same Duke of York who had given so characteristic a sample of Guelph generalship in leading his forces to defeat, gave an equally characteristic specimen of Guelph morality. He had for mistress one Mary Ann Clarke, a woman of low origin, who transferred her intimacy to a Colonel Wardle, and confided to him many of the secrets of her relations to the royal duke. Wardle, on Jan. 27, 1809, affirmed in the House of Commons that the Duke of York had permitted Mrs. Clarke to carry on a traffic in commissions and promotions, and demanded a public inquiry. Mrs. Clarke was examined at the bar of the House of Commons for several weeks, displaying a shameless, witty impudence that drew continual applause and laughter from a mob of English _gentlemen_, many of whom knew her too well. The charges were proved, and the Duke of York resigned his position as commander-in-chief; and the disclosures made--doctors of divinity suing for bishoprics, and priests for preferment, at the feet of a harlot, kissing her palm with coin--may teach Englishmen what they have to guard against even to-day on the part of that Tory party that has religion, conscience, and morality much more on its lips than in its heart.

It is not altogether irrelevant in this connection to mention that in 1825, when the Catholic relief bill had passed the House of Commons by 268 votes against 241, the Duke of York opposed the repeal of the Catholic disabilities by the common Tory appeal to what they call conscience, saying "these were the principles to which he would adhere, and which he would maintain and act up to, to the latest moment of his life existence, whatever might be his situation in life, _so help him God_."

England has indeed had to pay dearly for her hereditary monarchy, and for the awful hypocrisy which permits the appeal to God by such State Churchmen as the Duke of York to have any effect on politics. I need hardly say that the House of Lords did with the Catholic Emancipation Bill what it has lately done with the House of Commons Bill for Home Rule in Ireland, and threw it out.

While England was fighting France, she had also to fight the United States. It is an episode of which neither country has any reason to be proud. The New Englanders were mostly opposed to the declaration of war. The average Englishman knows little about it. He is taught by his history books that the victory of the "Shannon" over the "Chesapeake" destroyed the prestige of the American navy; and he is wrong even in that.

The "Shannon" had a brave and able commander, and had been many weeks at sea, so that Captain Broke had been able to train his men thoroughly, and, above all things, to prevent them from getting drunk.

Captain Lawrence had to engage many men who had never been on a war-vessel before, and did not know how to work the guns. Many of the sailors had bottles of rum in their pockets, and were too drunk to stand when their ship got within fighting distance of the "Shannon."

I wish our present Secretary of the Navy would learn the lesson, and now, when the need of the Newfoundlanders is so great, and when we require sober men to man our navy, give the brave fishermen of that island every reasonable inducement to enlist in our service.

The war closed unsatisfactorily, by the mediation of the Emperor Alexander of Russia; and the Treaty of Ghent left England mistress of the seas.

The treaties of 1814 and 1815 gave England another opportunity for relieving Newfoundland from the French control of her shore; but the Tories were at the helm, and became fellow-conspirators with other tyrants of Europe in perpetrating the most monstrous wrong and the completest restoration of despotism that was conceivable, in Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, everywhere.

They insulted France by imposing upon her the rule of a Bourbon, and to this Bourbon they guaranteed those rights over Newfoundland on which the French republic bases its claims to-day.

Let us now turn to Newfoundland itself. While the nations were fighting, its merchants had enjoyed the monopoly of the cod-fisheries. Some of the capitalists had secured profits between £20,000 and £40,000 a year each, but they made the poor fishermen pay eight pounds a barrel for flour and twelve pounds a barrel for pork. They took their fortunes to England. No effort was made to open up roads or extend agriculture; for, if it had been done, the landlords of England would not have been able to sell their pork and wheat at such exorbitant prices there.

So, when the war ceased and other nations were enabled to compete in the fisheries, the colony had to pass through some years of disaster and suffering, while the merchants were spending their exorbitant profits in England.

The planters and fishermen had been in the habit of leaving their savings in the hands of the St. John's merchants. Many of these failed, and the hardly won money of the fishermen was swept away by the insolvency of their bankers. It is estimated that the working class lost a sum little short of £400,000 sterling.

Now, eighty years later, we have another instance of the same misfortunes, proceeding from the same cause,--the fact that the money made by the fishery has been taken off to England; that the banks, which are altogether in the hands of the mercantile, or English, party, have been unfaithful to their trust; and that the fishermen who hold the bankers' notes get, from the one bank, 80 cents, and, from the other, only 20 cents on the dollar.

The merchants applied for aid to the British government; and in June, 1817, a committee of the House of Commons met. The merchants had only two remedies to propose. One was the granting of a bounty, to enable them to compete with the French and the Americans, who were sustained by bounties; but, although England was a protectionist country at that time, it gave only bounties in favor of rich men, and not of the poor. The other was the deportation of the principal part of the inhabitants, now numbering 70,000, to the neighboring colonies.

The honest, sensible, easy plan, that of opening up the land to cultivation, so that the starving people might be able to grow their own food and breed their own cattle, was the one thing that these so-called practical Englishmen would not permit, because it might interfere with the profits of the British land-owner and merchant.

At that very time the local authorities of Massachusetts were giving a bounty for each Newfoundland fisherman brought into the State.

When Sir Thomas Cochrane was made governor in 1825, his government made the first road in the island. For one hundred and forty-five years England had been master of the island, and not a single road had been built suitable for wheeled carriages. Is it conceivable that the French would so completely have neglected the colony if they had been its masters?

In 1832, when the Reform Bill put an end to the malign influence of Tory ascendency in England, Newfoundland also gained the boon of representative government; but it was only a merchants' government. The people who elected the House of Assembly did not dare to vote against the will of the merchants for fear of losing employment; and, while their representatives had the power of debating, passing measures, and voting moneys, the Council, which was composed of nominees of the crown, selected exclusively from the merchant class, could throw out all their measures, and were irresponsible to the people.

In England King George IV. had rendered only one service to the people,--he had brought royalty into contempt, and so strengthened the feeling which resulted in the passage of many necessary measures which his father and brothers had opposed. But the selfish interests of the merchants and land-owners of England were still in the way of many reforms. Benjamin Disraeli, who did his worst to prevent the starving people from having cheap bread, became the flunkey and afterward the master of the Tory squires; and it was not until thousands had died of famine in Ireland that the selfish land-owners agreed to that reduction of duty on grain which made free trade so popular in England.

Now, by a wise colonization policy, the government might have helped both Ireland and Newfoundland.

By passing a law to the effect that, so long as the French gave a bounty on the export of salt fish, the English government would give their own fishermen exactly the same amount of protection, the French would soon have been brought to terms; and, by opening up Newfoundland to settlement by roads and railways, many of the starving Irish would have been provided with homes under the British flag far more comfortable than any that they could find in their native land. So a more prosperous Ireland would have risen on this side of the Atlantic, and England would have gained thereby. The Irish and the Catholic were really quite as loyal to the empire as any others. The difference was that the English High Churchman and the Scotch Presbyterian got all the privileges; and the Irishman and the Catholic were taught by the action of the British government that insurrection was their only hope of getting simple justice.

India, China, Newfoundland, Ireland, were simply sweaters' dens for the profit of England and Scotland.

Just as in Newfoundland the British merchant insisted on keeping out every trace of free trade that would enable the poor fisherman to sell his fish in the highest market and buy his provisions in the lowest, so in China the British in 1838 insisted on forcing the Chinaman to buy the poisonous opium of India, although in 1834 the China government had warned the British of their intention to prohibit the infamous traffic. The war that England thereupon proclaimed against China was one of the most infamous and cowardly of the century, and made British Christianity more hateful even than its opium to the rulers of the Celestial Empire. £4,375,000 was extorted from the Chinese emperor for the expenses of the war ($20,000,000), and £1,250,000 ($5,000,000) for the opium which, with perfect justice, he had confiscated from the smugglers. The mob of London cheered the wagons which brought the ill-gotten treasure through the streets; and the mob in Parliament thanked the officers who had murdered the helpless and unoffending Chinese, while the parsons congratulated the people on the opening of China to British commerce, British civilization, and British religion.

The brutalizing influence of this method of carrying on the foreign trade of England was shown by a later altogether unnecessary war with China about the Lorcha "Arrow." This was a Chinese pirate vessel, which had obtained, by false pretences, the temporary possession of the British flag. On Oct. 8, 1856, the Chinese police boarded it in the Canton River, and took off twelve Chinamen on a charge of piracy. This they had a perfect right to do; but the British consul, Mr. Parkes, instead of thanking them, demanded the instant restoration of men who had been flying a British flag under false pretences. He applied to Sir John Bowring, the British plenipotentiary at Hong Kong, for assistance. Sir John was an able and experienced man. He had been editor of the _Westminster Review_, had a bowing, if not a speaking acquaintance with a dozen languages, had been one of the leaders of the free trade party, and had a thorough acquaintance with the Chinese trade. For many years he had been secretary of the Peace Society.

He was the author of several hymns. In fact, an American hymn-book contains not less than seventeen from his pen. One of them, found in most modern hymn-books, was that commencing,--

"In the cross of Christ I glory";

and its author proceeded to glory in the cross of the Prince of Peace by making war on the Chinese, although the governor, Yeh, had sent back all the men whose return was demanded by Mr. Parkes.

Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his "History of our own Times," says, "During the whole business Sir John Bowring contrived to keep himself almost invariably in the wrong; and, even where his claim happened to be in itself good, he managed to assert it in a manner at once untimely, imprudent, and indecent."

One of the highest legal authorities in England, Lord Lyndhurst, declared Sir John Bowring's action, and that of the British authorities who aided him, to be unjustifiable on any principle either of law or reason; and Mr. Cobden, himself an old friend of Sir John Bowring, moved in the House of Commons that "the papers which have been laid upon the table fail to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent measures resorted to at Canton in the late affair of the 'Arrow.'"

Nearly all the best men in the House of Commons--Gladstone, Roundell Palmer, Sydney Herbert, Milner Gibson, Sir Frederick Thesiger, as well as many of the chief Tories--supported Mr. Cobden; and the vote of censure was carried against Lord Palmerston's government by 263 to 247. But Lord Palmerston, then the hero of the Evangelical Church party,--"Palmerston, the true Protestant," "Palmerston, the only Christian Prime Minister,"--knew exactly the strength of British Christianity when it interfered with the sale of British beer, or Indian opium, or Manchester cotton, and appealed to the shop-keeper instincts of the British people. He dissolved Parliament; and Cobden, Bright, Milner Gibson, W.J. Fox, Layard, and many others were left without seats. Manchester rejected John Bright because he had spoken in the interests of peace and honor, and condemned one of the most cowardly, brutal, and unprovoked wars of the century.

We see the same cause at work in Ireland. One British bishop, Dr. Thirlwall, of St. David's, had the manliness to favor Mr. Gladstone's bill for the disestablishment of the Irish Church; but most of them acted in this matter in direct opposition to the teachings of Him whom they profess to worship as their God. Mr. John Bright warned the Lords that, by throwing themselves athwart the national course, they might meet with "accidents not pleasant to think of"; and there is no doubt that the warning had its effect. And even now I do not think that the people of Ireland will ever get from the House of Lords that measure of right which even the House of Commons has unwillingly and grudgingly, accorded to them, unless the Irishmen of America come to their aid in a more effective manner than they have ever yet done.

Newfoundland, unlike Ireland, has few friends in the United States, and therefore is wholly at England's mercy. What it suffered in the past I have already told. Let us see how England has treated it in the last few years.

It was from Lord Palmerston, of all men, that the Newfoundlander might hope for redress.

He had said in the Don Pacifico case, "As the Roman in the days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say, 'Civis Romanus sum,' so also a British subject, in whatever land he be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England shall protect him against injustice and wrong."

Surely, the 200,000 Newfoundlanders had more right to expect that Lord Palmerston would maintain this principle in their defence than the extortionate Portuguese Jew or the Chinese pirates who were taken from the Lorcha "Arrow."

And Lord Palmerston had the best opportunity of helping the Newfoundlander; for he was the intimate friend of Louis Napoleon and Persigny. By his approbation of Louis Napoleon's _coup d'état_ he became the creator of the Anglo-French Alliance; and, since this alliance was a matter of life and death to the Second Empire, he might have used the opportunity, after the Crimean War, of exercising such pressure upon Louis Napoleon as to secure justice to Newfoundland.

But he neglected it, and thereby, he lost the opportunity of strengthening the position of England and Canada towards the United States at the time of the "Trent" and "Alabama" affairs.

We may be glad of this; but, from a British point of view, it was not merely an injustice to Newfoundland, but also a political blunder.

One would suppose that, simply as a matter of imperial policy, the British government would long ago have built a railroad across this island, in order to have the quickest possible connection with its Canadian dependency. The Fenian raids into Canada, the Confederate raids from Canada, the Red River Rebellion, the possibility of war arising from the "Trent" incident, the necessity of securing a rapid means of communication with the Pacific, should all, on purely strategic grounds, have induced the British government to establish a safe naval station in some southern harbor of Newfoundland, with a railroad communication to the west shores of the island.

But the government left the Newfoundlanders, impoverished by the consequences of British misrule, to take the initiative; and it was not until 1878 that they were able to do anything. Then the Hon. William V. Whiteway induced the Newfoundland government to offer an annual subsidy of $120,000 per annum and liberal grants of crown lands to any company which would construct and operate a railway across Newfoundland, connecting by steamers with Britain or Ireland on the one hand, and the Intercolonial and Canadian lines on the other. Of the immense advantage of such a line to Great Britain, constructed as it would be at the expense of Newfoundland, I need hardly speak, and every patriotic ministry would have greeted the proposal with enthusiasm; but, most unfortunately both for England and for Newfoundland, the Premier was Mr. Disraeli, and the Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury. What Lord Salisbury was may be learned from Mr. James G. Blaine's account of his speeches and conduct as Lord Robert Cecil in 1862. I know of no sermon preached within the last thirty years that inculcates a more necessary moral and religious lesson for Lords and Commons and parsons of England than that taught in the twentieth chapter of the Hon. James G. Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress." From it we may learn, first of all, that the right of secession of Ireland or Newfoundland from the British empire is already virtually conceded by many of the Tory leaders of England. Mr. Blaine gives us in that chapter a list of twenty-four members of the British House of Commons, ten members of the British Peerage, one admiral, one vice-admiral, one captain, one colonel, one lieutenant-colonel, and a host of knights and baronets who subscribed money to the Confederate Cotton Loan, while he gives extracts from the speeches of Bernal Osborne, Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Mr. Gregory, M.P., Mr. G.W. Bentinck, M.P., Lord Robert Cecil, now Marquis of Salisbury, M. Lindsy, M.P., Lord Campbell, Earl Malmesbury, Mr. Laird, M.P. (the builder of the "Alabama" and the rebel rams), Mr. Horsman, M.P. for Stroud, the Marquis of Clanricarde (a name familiar to all Irishmen from its connection with the evictions), Mr. Peacocke, M.P., Mr. Clifforde, M.P., Mr. Haliburton, M.P., Lord Robert Montague, Sir James Ferguson, the Earl of Donoughmore, Mr. Alderman Rose, Lord Brougham, and the Right Hon. William Ewart Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, breathing hostility to the cause of the Union States and friendship for the slaveholder; while the few honest men in the House of Commons, who, like John Bright, Foster, Charles Villiers, Milner Gibson, and Cobden, spoke for the cause of the North, were reviled, not alone by their colleagues, but even by many of their constituents, because they defended the side of liberty, truth, and justice.

Why should we withhold from the just cause of Ireland and Newfoundland the sympathy which England gave to the secessionist slaveholder?

Of course the London _Times_ was on the slaveholder's side. On the last day of December, 1864, it said that "Mr. Seward and other teachers and flatterers of the multitude still affect to anticipate the early restoration of the Union"; and in three months from that date the rebels were conquered.