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NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE
JINGOES
_AN APPEAL TO ENGLAND'S HONOR_
BY
JOHN FRETWELL
BOSTON MASS.: GEO H. ELLIS
TORONTO, CANADA: HUNTER ROSE & CO.
WESTMINSTER ENGLAND: ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO.
COPYRIGHT 1895 BY JOHN FRETWELL.
COPYRIGHTED IN ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES
RIGHT OF TRANSLATION AND REPUBLICATION RESERVED
GEO. H. ELLIS, PRINTER, 141 FRANKLIN STREET, BOSTON.
"To be taken into the American Union is to be adopted into a
partnership. To belong as a Crown Colony to the British Empire, as
things stand, is no partnership at all.
"It is to belong to a power which sacrifices, as it has always
sacrificed, the interest of its dependencies to its own. The blood
runs freely through every vein and artery of the American body
corporate. Every single citizen feels his share in the life of his
nation. Great Britain leaves her Colonies to take care of
themselves, refuses what they ask, and forces on them what they
had rather be without.
"If I were a West Indian, I should feel that under the stars and
stripes I should be safer than I was at present from political
experimenting. I should have a market in which to sell my produce
where I should be treated as a friend. I should have a power
behind me and protecting me, and I should have a future to which I
could look forward with confidence. America would restore me to
hope and life: Great Britain allows me to sink, contenting herself
with advising me to be patient. Why should I continue loyal when
my loyalty was so contemptuously valued?"--JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
(from "The English in the West Indies," Nov. 15, 1887).
"In the United States is Canada's natural market for buying as
well as for selling, the market which her productions are always
struggling to enter through every opening in the tariff wall, for
exclusion from which no distant market either in England or
elsewhere can compensate her, the want of which brings on her
commercial atrophy, and drives the flower of her youth by
thousands and tens of thousands over the line.
"The Canadian North-west remains unpeopled while the neighboring
States of the Union are peopled, because it is cut off from the
continent to which it belongs by a fiscal and political
line."--GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L., in "Questions of the Day," page
159. (Macmillan & Co., London, 1893).
PREFACE.
It would be evidence of gross ignorance, or something worse, to
pretend that the United States, under like conditions, would have
treated the Newfoundlanders better than England has done. It would be
especially so after the humiliating spectacle presented to the world
by our Democratic majorities last year in Congress and in the State
and city of New York.
With material resources superior to those of any other country in the
world, we are obliged to appeal to the European money-lender for gold.
Even the chosen head of our Tory Democracy tells Congress that we must
sacrifice $16,000,000 to obtain gold on the terms offered by his
Secretary of the Treasury.
England's past blunders have been singularly favorable to American
interests, when real statesmen were at the helm in Washington. Any
strategist can see that, if Lord Palmerston, instead of bullying weak
Greece and China, had done justice to Newfoundland, his government
might have acquired so strong a position in America as to seriously
imperil the preservation of the Union some thirty years ago. That he
failed to do his duty was as fortunate for the United States as it was
unfortunate for Newfoundland. To-day, but for the emasculating
influence of our Tory Democracy, England's blunders in the same island
would be profitable to the United States.
Even for our small and expensive navy we cannot find sufficient able
seamen among our citizens; and the starving fishermen of Newfoundland
are just the men we need. But there is no money in the national
treasury to pay them; while our ridiculous immigration and suffrage
laws exclude the men we need, and enable the scum of Europe to
influence our legislation.
I trust this tract may suggest to some Englishmen the best way to
prevent a repetition of the present distress, and so show the world
that, after all, loyalty is sometimes appreciated in imperial circles.
The old project of a rapid line of steamers from Bay St. George to
Chaleurs Bay, giving England communication via Newfoundland with
Montreal in less than five days, has been revived; but the route is
closed by winter ice, and too far north for the United States.
A better route, open all the year round, is that from Port aux Basques
to Neil's Cove, a distance of only fifty-two miles by sea against two
hundred and fifty miles from Bay St. George to Paspebiac or Shippegan;
and still better is the route via Port aux Basques and Louisbourg,
which will soon be connected with the American lines, with a single
break of three miles at the Gut of Canso Ferry. With all its faults,
British rule has one advantage over that of all other colonial powers:
it gives the foreigner, no matter what his faith or nation, exactly
the same commercial rights as the British subject; and so, although
Newfoundland will lose by the exclusion of its fish from our protected
markets, and by the diplomatic inability of the British government to
protect it from the effects of French bounties and treaty rights, the
enlightened selfishness of the New Englander will find that, "there is
money for him" in the development of those resources which have been
so singularly neglected by the British capitalists who invest their
money in the most rotten schemes that Yankee ingenuity can invent.
J.F.
Feb. 11, 1895.
AUTHORITIES.
In the following pages I have drawn largely on the well-known works of
Hatton and Harvey, Bonnycastle, Pedley, Bishop Howley, and Spearman's
article in the _Westminster Review_ for 1892, concerning Newfoundland;
and, on the general question, on Froude's "England to the Defeat of
the Spanish Armada," Lecky's "History of England in the Eighteenth
Century," Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress," Hansard's Debates, "The
Annual Register," McCarthy's "History of our own Times," and the Blue
Books of the British government.
To the tourist who proposes to visit the island I can recommend Rev.
Moses Harvey's "Newfoundland in 1894," published in St. John's, as the
best guide to the island. Mr. Harvey has also written an excellent
article on the island for Baedeker's "Canada." For the hunter,
painter, photographer, angler, yachtsman, or geologist, there is not a
more attractive excursion, for from one to three months, along the
whole American coast than that through and round Newfoundland.
J.F.
NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE JINGOES.
BY JOHN FRETWELL.
The most prominent and able intellectual representative of the money
power in the world, the London _Times_, writes of Newfoundland:--
"Even if we were disposed to do so, we cannot in our position as a
naval power view with indifference the disaster to, and possibly the
ruin of, a colony we may sometimes regard as amongst the most valuable
of our naval stations. Neither can we view the position without
consideration for the wide-spread suffering that an absolute refusal
to grant assistance would entail. It is probable that a cheaper system
of administration would retrieve the position without casting an
overwhelmingly heavy burden upon the imperial tax-payers. If we
interpret public feeling aright, it will be in favor of giving the
colony the help that may be found essential; but, if the assistance
required takes anything like the radical proportion that at present
seems necessary, it can only be granted at a price,--the surrender of
the Constitution and the return of Newfoundland to the condition of a
crown colony."
While we may safely concede to the editors of the _Times_ as much
"consideration for wide-spread suffering" as to a Jay Gould or a
Napoleon, the above-quoted words are significant, because they show
that what the ruling powers in England would never concede to charity
or justice they will give to self-interest, now that the _Times_ has
discovered "there is money in it."
But to us Americans the words have their lessons also. Newfoundland
not only belongs to our Continental system, but it can never be
really prosperous until it becomes a State in our Union. What it is
to-day, New England might have been, had it not been delivered by the
Continental forces, and by the French navy, from the rule of British
Tories. And, as a member of our Union, this island, five times the
size of Massachusetts, might not only be as prosperous as Rhode Island
or Connecticut, but also the chief training ground for our future
navy, which, checked by the piracies of the British-built "Alabama,"
will become in the near future an indispensable necessity of our
national existence.
Since the English people seem to have taken to heart, far more than
his own countrymen have done, the lesson taught by our Captain Mahan
in his "Influence of the Sea-power in History," it is well that we
should consider the past history of England's relations to that
first-born colony which she has so infamously sacrificed, and for
whose misfortunes she alone is responsible.
The lesson that we may learn from that history is quite as much needed
by the American as by the Briton. Edmund R. Spearman, writing in the
_Westminster Review_ (Vol. 137, page 403, 1892), says:--
"No English Homer has yet risen to tell the tale of Newfoundland,
shrouded in mystery and romance, the daring invasion and vicissitudes
of those exhaustless fisheries, the battle of life in that seething
cauldron of the North Atlantic, where the swelling billows never rest,
and the hurricane only slumbers to bring forth the worse dangers of
the fog-bank and the iceberg. Fierce as has been during the four
centuries the fight for the fisheries by European rivals, their petty
racial quarrels sink into insignificance before the general struggle
for the harvest. The Atlantic roar hides all minor pipings. The breed
of fisher-folk from these deep-sea voyagings consist of the toughest
specimens of human endurance. All other dangers which lure men to
venture everything for excitement or for fortune, the torrid heat or
arctic cold, the battle against man or beast, the desert or the
jungle, all land adventures are as nothing compared to the daring of
the hourly existence of the heroic souls whose lives are cast upon the
banks of Newfoundland. The fishermen may seem wild and reckless, rough
and illiterate; but supreme danger and superlative sacrifice breed
noble qualities, and beneath the rough exterior of the fisherman you
will never fail to find a MAN, and no cheap imitation of the genuine
article. None but a man can face for a second time the frown of the
North Atlantic, that exhibition of mighty, all-consuming power, beside
the sober reality of which all the ecstasies of poets and painters are
puny failures. Among these heroes of the sea England's children have
always been foremost. We should expect England to be especially proud
of such an offspring, familiar with their struggles, and ever heedful
of their welfare, lending an ear to their claims or complaints above
all others. Strange to say, it has always been the exact reverse."
Though discovered by John and Sebastian Cabot in 1494, "the
twenty-fourth of June at five o'clock in the morning," it was not
until ninety years later that the island was formally organized as an
English colony (Aug. 5, 1582, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert).
The persecutions of Bloody Mary and the massacre of St. Bartholomew
had roused the indignation of Englishmen to the highest pitch. They
were ready for any risk in open war against France and Spain, but
Queen Elizabeth was always trying to shirk responsibility; and so the
sea-captains who would avenge the wrongs done to the Protestants were
obliged to run the risk of being condemned as pirates.
One of them wrote to Queen Elizabeth, Nov. 6, 1577, offering to fit
out ships, well armed, for the Banks of Newfoundland, where some
twenty-five thousand fishermen went out from France, Spain, and
Portugal every summer to catch the food of their Catholic fast days.
He proposed to treat these fishermen as the Huguenots of France had
been treated,--to bring away the best of their ships, and to burn the
rest. Nine days after the date of this letter Francis Drake sailed
from Plymouth, commanding a fleet of five ships, equipped by a company
of private adventurers, of whom Queen Elizabeth was the largest
shareholder. Fortunately, they never committed the horrible crime
suggested in that letter. In those five ships, says Froude, lay the
germ of Great Britain's ocean empire.
In 1585 Sir John Hawkins, who had meanwhile annexed Newfoundland to
the English Dominion, proposed again to take a fleet to the Fishing
Banks, whither half the sailors of Spain and Portugal went annually to
fish for cod.
He would destroy them all at one fell swoop, cripple the Spanish
marine for years, and leave the galleons to rot in the harbors for
want of sailors to man them.
Had this been done, Philip of Spain would never have been able to
threaten England with his "Invincible Armada." But the brave
Englishmen of those days had to deal with a treacherous queen. The
Hollanders who had engaged in a desperate struggle that they might
have done with lies, and serve God with honesty and sincerity, were
willing and eager to be annexed to England, and in union with her
would have formed so strong a power as to be able to resist any
Continental league against them.
But Elizabeth cared more for herself than for her country and her
cause, and thus made warlike measures necessary which an Oliver
Cromwell would have avoided.
Her duplicity may have provoked those republican ideas that were
brought by Brewster and the other Pilgrim Fathers to America. Brewster
was the friend and companion of Davison, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary
of State, who was sent on an embassy to the Netherlands by her; and
the contrast between these brave citizens and the treachery of the
"good Queen Bess" must have given him a profound sense of the injury
done to a great nation by the vices and follies of royalty.
The infamous manner in which the queen afterwards used her faithful
secretary, Davison, as her scapegoat, and the sycophancy of Sandys,
Archbishop of York, at Davison's mock trial, were strong arguments
both against royalty and prelacy.
Under the cowardly, childish, and pedantic king who succeeded
Elizabeth, Newfoundland was the bone of contention between the
factions at his court, between Catholics and Protestants, and men who
were neither, and men who were both.
Among the latter was the gallant Yorkshireman, Sir George Calvert, who
was Secretary of State to James, but was compelled to resign his
office in 1624, because he became a Catholic.
The British and Irish Catholics who came over seem to have been the
men who came out to Newfoundland with the most honest intent of
any,--to better themselves without injury to others, and to seek there
"freedom to worship God" at a time when that freedom was denied in
England, both to the Catholic and the Puritan. In 1620 Calvert had
bought a patent conveying to him the lordship of all the south-eastern
peninsula, which he called Avalon, the ancient name of Glastonbury in
England.
He proposed to found there an asylum for the persecuted Catholics; and
at a little harbor on the eastern shore, just south of Cape Broyle,
which he called Verulam, a name since corrupted to Ferryland, he built
a noble mansion, and spent altogether some $150,000, a much larger sum
in those days than it seems now. But the site was ill chosen; and the
imbecility of King James encouraged the French to attack the colony,
so that at last Calvert wrote to Burleigh, "I came here to plant and
set and sow, but have had to fall to fighting Frenchmen." He went
home, and in the last year of his life he obtained a grant of land,
which is now occupied by the States of Delaware and Maryland; and to
its chief city his son gave the name of the wild Irish headland and
fishing village, whence he took his own name of Lord Baltimore in the
Irish peerage.
After Calvert's departure, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland sent out a
number of settlers; and in 1638 Sir David Kirke, one of the bravest of
England's sea-captains, who had taken Quebec, received from Charles I.
a grant of all Newfoundland, and settled at Verulam, or Ferryland, the
place founded by Calvert. Under Kirke the colony prospered; but, as he
took the part of Charles in the civil war, his possessions were
confiscated by the victorious Commonwealth.
At that time there were nearly two thousand settlers along the eastern
shore of Avalon; and the great Protector, Oliver Cromwell, protected
the rights of the Newfoundland settlers as he did those of the
Waldensians.
After his death came what Mr. Spearman calls the "blots in the English
history known as the reigns of Charles II. and his deposed brother."
Mr. Spearman continues, "Frenchmen must understand that no Englishman
will for a moment accept as a precedent anything in those two reigns
affecting the relations of France and of England."
But here Mr. Spearman counts without his host. He should recollect
that the British government has, since the death of Charles II., paid
an annual pension to the Dukes of Richmond simply because they were
descended from the Frenchwoman, Louise de la Querouaille, whose
influence induced Charles II. to betray English interests to France,
and that but the other day the Salisbury government recognized that
precedent by paying the Duke of Richmond a very large sum of money to
buy off this infamous claim. So long as the names of the Dukes of
Richmond and Saint Alban's (both descendant of Charles II.'s
mistresses) remain on the roll of the British Peerage, the Frenchman
will have a right to laugh at Mr. Spearman's claim; for we cannot
ignore a precedent in our intercourse with foreigners, so long as we
act upon it in our domestic affairs.
Scarcely was Charles the Libertine seated on the throne of England,
when the Frenchmen, in 1660, settled on the southern shore of
Newfoundland, at a place which they called La Plaisance (now known as
Placentia).
They were certainly either wiser or more fortunate in their choice of
a location than the English; for, while St. John's and Ferryland, on
the straight shore of Avalon, are exposed to the wildest gales of the
Atlantic, and shut out by the arctic ice from all communication with
the ocean for a part of the winter, Placentia is a protected harbor,
open all the year round, and having a sheltered waterway navigable for
the largest ships to the northernmost and narrowest part of the
Isthmus of Avalon.
We must believe that the French would have managed Newfoundland better
than the English if they had kept the island; for the men who cut the
Isthmus of Suez would surely long ago have made a passage, three miles
long, by which the ships of Trinity Bay might have found their way at
the close of autumn to the safe winter harbors of the southern coast.
All along the southern shore the names on the map tell us of French
occupation.
Port aux Basques, Harbor Breton, Rencontre Bay (called by the English
Round Counter), Cape La Hune, Bay d'Espoir, are but a few of them.
The name which the English have given to this last is strangely
characteristic. The Bay of Hope (Baie d'Espoir) of the French has been
changed into the Bay of Despair of the English. It was really a Bay of
Hope to the French; for from the head of one of its fiords, deep
enough for the largest of our modern ships, an Indian trail goes
northwards in less than 100 miles to the fertile valley of the
Exploits River. Can we suppose that the French engineers would have
allowed 200 years to elapse without building a road along this trail?
And yet not a single road was built by the English conquerors before
the year 1825; and even to-day, to reach the point where the Indian
trail crosses the Exploits, we must travel 260 miles by rail from
Placentia or St. John's instead of 100 from Bay d'Espoir, simply
because the English holders of property in St. John's, like dogs in
the manger, will not permit any improvement in the country, unless it
can be made tributary to their special interests.
That the English were worse enemies of Newfoundland than the French,
even in King Charles's time, may be seen from the advice given by Sir
Josiah Child, the chairman of that great monopoly, the East India
Company, that the island "was to have no government, nor inhabitants
permitted to reside at Newfoundland, nor any passengers or private
boat-keepers permitted to fish at Newfoundland."
The Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations adopted the
suggestion of Sir Josiah; and in 1676, just a century before the
American Declaration of Independence, the west country adventurers
began to drive away the resident inhabitants, and to take possession
of their houses and fishing stages, and did so much damage in three
weeks that Thomas Oxford declared 1,500 men could not make it good.
We should be unjust if we were to regard this infamous dishonesty as
simply an accident of the Restoration time. Many of my American
readers have doubtless heard of an island called Ireland, which is
much nearer to England than Newfoundland. Lecky tells us how the
English land-owners, always foremost in selfishness, procured the
enactment of laws, in 1665 and 1680, absolutely prohibiting the
importation into England from Ireland of all cattle, sheep, and swine,
of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and even of butter and cheese, with
the natural result that the French were enabled to procure these
provisions at lower prices, and their work of settling their sugar
plantations was much facilitated thereby.
In the Navigation Act of 1663 Ireland was deprived of all the
advantages accorded to English ones, and thus lost her colonial trade;
and, after the Revolution, the commercial influence, which then became
supreme in the councils of England, was almost as hostile to Ireland
as that of the Tory landlords. A Parliament was summoned in Dublin, in
1698, for the express purpose of destroying Irish industry; and a year
later the Irish were prohibited from exporting their manufactured wool
to any other country whatever. Prohibitive duties were imposed on
Irish sail-cloth imported into England. Irish checked, striped, and
dyed linens were absolutely excluded from the colonies, and burdened
with a duty of 30 per cent. if imported into England. Ireland was not
allowed to participate in the bounties granted for the exportation of
these descriptions of linen from Great Britain to foreign countries.
In 1698, two petitions, from Folkestone and Aldborough, were presented
to Parliament, complaining of the injury done to the fishermen of
those towns "by the Irish catching herrings at Waterford and Wexford,
and sending them to the Straits, and thereby forestalling and ruining
petitioners' markets"; and there was even a party in England who
desired to prohibit all fisheries on the Irish shore except by boats
built and manned by Englishmen.
Not only were the Irish prevented from earning money, but they were
forced to pay large sums to the mistresses of English kings. Lecky
tells us that the Duke of Saint Alban's, the bastard son of Charles
II., enjoyed an Irish pension of L800 a year. Catherine Sedley, the
mistress of James II., had another of L5,000 a year. William III.
bestowed a considerable Irish estate on his mistress, Elizabeth
Villiers. The Duchess of Kendall and the Countess of Darlington, two
mistresses of the German Protestant George I., had Irish pensions of
the united value of L5,000. Lady Walsingham, daughter of the
first-named of these mistresses, had an Irish pension of L1,500; and
Lady Howe, daughter of the second, had a pension of L500. Madame de
Walmoden, mistress of the German Protestant King George II., had an
Irish pension of L3,000. This king's sister, the queen dowager of
Prussia, Count Bernsdorff, a prominent German politician, and a number
of other German names may be found on the Irish pension list.
Lecky's description of the Protestant Church of Ireland is just as
revolting. Archbishop Bolton wrote, "A true Irish bishop [meaning
bishops of English birth and of the Protestant Church] has nothing
more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat and rich, and die."
The English primate of Ireland ordained and placed in an Irish living
a Hampshire deer-stealer, who had only saved himself from the gallows
by turning informer against his comrades. Archbishop King wrote to
Addison, "You make nothing in England of ordering us to provide for
such and such a man L200 per annum, and, when he has it, by favor of
the government, he thinks he may be excused attendance; but you do not
consider that such a disposition takes up, perhaps, a tenth part of
the diocese, and turns off the cure of ten parishes to one curate."
From the very highest appointment to the lowest, in secular and sacred
things, all departments of administration in Ireland were given over
as a prey to rapacious jobbers. Charles Lucas, M.P. for Dublin, wrote
in 1761 to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, "Your excellency will often
find the most infamous of men, the very outcasts of Britain, put into
the highest employments or loaded with exorbitant pensions; while all
that ministered and gave sanction to the most shameful and destructive
measures of such viceroys never failed of an ample share in the spoils
of a plundered people."
Arthur Young, in 1779, estimated the rents of absentee landlords alone
at L732,000; and Hutchinson, in the same year, stated that the sums
remitted from Ireland to Great Britain for rents, interest of money,
pensions, salaries, and profit of offices amounted, on the lowest
computation (from 1668 to 1773), to L1,110,000 yearly.
If, in treating of Newfoundland, I have made many extracts from Mr.
Lecky's references to Ireland, it is in order that I may show Mr.
Spearman the danger of laying too much stress on the French claims as
the cause of the present distress in England's oldest colony.
France had no claims in Ireland, and yet the conduct of the British
government and the British tradesman to that unfortunate island is one
of the blackest infamies of the eighteenth century.
Mr. Lecky says in Chapter V., page 11, of his history: "To a sagacious
observer of colonial politics two facts were becoming evident. The one
was that the deliberate and malignant selfishness of English
commercial legislation was digging a chasm between the mother country
and the colonies which must inevitably, when the latter had become
sufficiently strong, lead to separation. The other was that the
presence of the French in Canada was an essential condition of the
maintenance of the British empire in America."
If Mr. Lecky had studied Newfoundland's history, he might have added a
third fact; namely, that the French claims in Newfoundland have been
for the Jingoes of the last half-century a convenient means of excuse
for shirking their own responsibility to the unfortunate island, and
for covering up the malignant selfishness of those tradesmen in Canada
and England to whose private interests the island has been sacrificed
by the government.
It is interesting to observe how, at the time of the Peace of Utrecht,
on Article XIII. of which the modern claims of France are based, the
conditions were similar to those of Tory intrigue to-day.
King Louis of France, encouraged by the momentary supremacy of the
Tories in England, had insulted the English people by recognizing the
Pretender as King of England.
The popular indignation roused by this insult enabled King William, by
dissolving Parliament, to overthrow the Tory power, and obtain a large
majority pledged to war with France. The Whigs carried this war to a
victorious conclusion; but, most unfortunately for both England and
its colonies, Abigail Masham, by her influence over the queen, secured
the overthrow of the Whigs. And her cousin Harley, a Tory, became
Chancellor of the Exchequer, thus permitting the Tories to reap the
fruits of Whig victories. In reference to the conclusion of the peace
with France Lecky says, "The tortuous proceedings that terminated in
the Peace of Utrecht form, beyond all question, one of the most
shameful pages in English history."
The greatest of England's generals was removed from the head of the
army, and replaced by a Tory of no military ability. The allies of
England were most basely deserted; and a clause was inserted in the
treaty respecting Newfoundland to the following effect:--
"But it is allowed to the subjects of France to practise fishing and
to dry fish on land in that part only which stretches from the place
called Bonavista to the Northern Point of the said Island, and from
thence, running down by the Western Side, reaches as far as the place
called Point Riche."
What compensation was given by France in return for this right to
catch and dry fish on a part of the Newfoundland shore?
That was the immense accession of guilty wealth acquired by the
Assiento Treaty, by which England obtained the monopoly of the
slave-trade to the Spanish colonies.
In the one hundred and six years from 1680 to 1786 England sent
2,130,000 slaves to America and the West Indies.
On this point Lecky writes: "It may not be uninteresting to observe
that, among the few parts of the Peace of Utrecht which appear to have
given unqualified satisfaction at home, was the Assiento contract,
which made of England the great slave-trader of the world. _The last
prelate who took a leading part in English_ politics affixed his
signature to the treaty. A Te Deum, composed by Handel, was sung in
thanksgiving in the churches. Theological passions had been recently
more vehemently aroused; and theological controversies had for some
years acquired a wider and more absorbing interest in England than in
any period since the Commonwealth. But it does not yet appear to have
occurred to any class that a national policy, which made it its main
object to encourage the kidnapping of tens of thousands of negroes,
and their consignment to the most miserable slavery, might be at least
as inconsistent with the spirit of the Christian religion as either
the establishment of Presbyterianism or the toleration of prelacy in
Scotland."
Is it not characteristic that, just as the Tories of Queen Anne's time
were willing to prejudice the rights of a colony in return for the
infamous profits of the slave-trade, so the Tory of 1862, Lord Robert
Cecil, was among the chief Englishmen who sympathized with the
slaveholders who were then attacking the American Union?
It is equally characteristic that this first of the Primrose Dames,
Abigail Masham, quarrelled with her cousin Harley about the share
which this lady of High Church principles was to receive out of the
profits of the infamous trade.
Surely, the country that made so much profit out of the slave-trade is
bound to compensate Newfoundland for the losses caused by its weakness
in the French shore question rather than that France which in 1713
abandoned the infamous traffic to the British Tories.
The next treaty between France and England, that of Aix-la-Chapelle,
in 1748, made no alteration in the Newfoundland question; but the
government of England, in returning Louisbourg to the French, gave
another of those proofs of the selfish indifference of the home
government to the rights of the colonies which was one of the most
potent causes that led the New Englanders, with the aid of France, to
achieve their independence.
At the south-eastern extremity of Cape Breton Island the strong
fortress of Louisbourg, which it was once the fashion to call the
Gibraltar of America, threatened the safety of the New England and
Newfoundland fisheries alike. Governor Shirley of Massachusetts
induced the legislature to undertake an expedition against this
fortress, and intrusted its command to Colonel William Pepperell. The
New England forces, raw troops, commanded by untrained officers,
astonished the world by capturing a fortress which was deemed
impregnable. This was the most brilliant and decisive achievement of
nine years of otherwise useless bloodshed and treachery.
It is well that the people of the United States propose to celebrate
its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year; for, more than any
other event in their colonial history, it gave them confidence in the
power of untrained men of spirit to overcome the hireling soldiers of
the European governments.
But the action of the British government at the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle, in restoring this fortress to the French, gave the
colonists an equally necessary lesson. What did England get in
exchange? The already mentioned Assiento, that famous compact which
gave to England the right to ship slaves to the Spanish colonies, was
confirmed for the four years it still had to run; and the fortress of
Madras, which had been taken by the French in 1746, was restored to
England in 1748 by the treaty. Even the most selfish and heartless of
British politicians may doubt whether the true interests of his
country were served by abandoning the American fortress for that of
India; but the American statesman will not fail to see in the conduct
of England towards her American colonists in this transaction a
justification not alone for the Declaration of Independence, but also
for that Monroe doctrine which, in its fullest application, will
prevent the interference of any European power in the affairs of any
part of America, not excluding Newfoundland. The Treaty of Paris, in
1763, which made Great Britain practically master of North America,
produced no change in the position of the 13,000 settlers then in
Newfoundland. For them the London government cared nothing. The
provisions of the treaty, by which France gave up Canada to England,
only served to emphasize more strongly the injustice done by England
to her Catholic population, both in Ireland and in Newfoundland.
In 1719 the Irish Privy Council, all tools of England; actually
proposed to the London government that every unregistered priest or
friar remaining in Ireland after the 1st of May, 1720, should be
castrated; and, although the English ministers did not accept this
suggestion, they adopted one that such priests should have a large P
branded with a red-hot iron on their cheeks. It can be hardly wondered
at that the more honest Irishmen sought refuge from such infamies
either in foreign service or in the colonies; and many of them came to
Newfoundland, only to find that the Church of England spirit of
persecution was rampant there also.
Every government official was obliged to abjure the special tenets of
Catholicism. In 1755 Governor Darrell commanded all masters of vessels
who brought out Irish passengers to carry them back at the close of
the fishing season. A special tax was levied on Roman Catholics, and
the celebration of mass was made a penal offence. At Harbor Main,
Sept. 25, 1755, the magistrates were ordered to fine a certain man L50
because he had allowed a priest to celebrate mass in one of his
fishing-rooms. The room was ordered to be demolished, and the owner to
sell his possessions and quit the harbor. Another who was present at
the same mass was fined L20, and his house and stage destroyed by
fire. Other Catholics who had not been present, were fined L10 each,
and ordered to leave the settlement. These infamies were not altered
until the Tory government was humiliated by the victory of the United
States and their allies. But even then the Newfoundland settlers were
taught that England treats her loyal colonist more harshly than the
possible rebel.
The Newfoundland settlers, Catholic or Protestant, had proved the most
loyal men in the colony.
When the French, under D'Iberville, captured St. John's, and all
Newfoundland lay at their feet, the solitary exception was the little
Island of Carbonear in Conception Bay, where the persecuted settler
John Pynn and his gallant band still held aloft the British flag. In
1704-5 St. John's was again laid waste by the French, under Subercase;
and, although Colonel Moody successfully defended the fort, the town
was burned, and all the settlements about Conception Bay were raided
by the French and their Indian allies. But Pynn and Davis bravely and
successfully defended their island Gibraltar in Conception Bay.
In 1708 Saint Ovide surprised and captured St. John's, but again old
John Pynn held the fort at Carbonear.
In the American War one of Pynn's descendants, a clerk at Harbor
Grace, raised a company of grenadiers from Conception Bay; and they
fought with such success in Canada that he was knighted as Sir Henry
Pynn, and raised to the rank of general. But the selfish government at
home cared nothing for Newfoundland. The first Congress of the United
States, Sept. 5, 1774, forbade all exports to the British possessions.
This would not have hurt Newfoundland if the settlers had been allowed
to carry on agricultural pursuits there. But these had always been
discouraged by the English; and so they were dependent on the New
England States for their supplies, and were threatened with absolute
famine as soon as the war broke out. Had they been disloyal, they
might have gained their rights from England; but their very loyalty to
such a government was their worst misfortune.
Even in 1783 the Englishman had not learned the evil results of
permitting royal interference in British politics. It is not merely in
the reigns of the libertine kings that we see this. Queen Elizabeth
injured England by interfering with the policy of its wisest
statesmen. The ascendency of Harley and Saint John Bolingbroke, who
deserted England's allies and threw away the fruits of Marlborough's
victories, was due to the influence of a High Church waiting-woman
over Queen Anne; and now, when even Lord North, to say nothing of the
better class of Englishmen, disapproved of George III.'s obstinate
resistance to the just claims of the American colonies, the support
given to the king by the Tories led to the loss of a dominion far more
valuable to England than all the trade of India or China.
He was obliged to call on a Liberal minister to undo, as far as
possible, the evil done by himself and the Tories, just as in later
days Mr. Gladstone had to settle with the United States the damage
done by the Tories in the "Alabama" question.
The death of Rockingham left the direction of the negotiations with
France and the United States in the hands of Lord Shelburne; and that
he was extremely liberal in his arrangements with both countries was
not to be wondered at. The wrong had been done by England; and the
innocent English had to suffer, as well as the guilty ones.
Unfortunately for Newfoundland, Shelburne did not cede this island to
the United States; and so it had to bear more than its share in the
misfortunes which the policy of King George had brought upon the
British empire.
Mr. Spearman (page 411) writes that "Adams, the United States envoy,
himself bred up among the New England fishermen, said 'he would fight
the war all over again' rather than give up the ancestral right of the
New Englanders to the Newfoundland fisheries"; but that Shelburne
should be able, when France and America were victorious, to take away
from the former power the concessions made to it by the Tories in 1713
and in 1763 was not to be expected.
There was a slight alteration in the shore line on which the French
might fish. They abandoned that right between Cape Bonavista and Cape
St. John, in consideration of being allowed to catch and dry their
fish along the shore between Point Riche and Cape Ray. That was all;
and that is precisely the reason why the Beaconsfield-Salisbury
cabinet, in 1878, refused their sanction to the Bay St. George
Railroad.
The only advantage that the poor Newfoundlanders gained from the war
which caused them so much distress was the fact that the English
government was _whipped_ into conceding to their Roman Catholic
population some of the rights which for many years afterwards it
obstinately withheld from their brethren in Ireland.
In 1784 Vice-Admiral John Campbell, a man of liberal, enlightened
spirit, was appointed governor, and issued an order that all persons
inhabiting the island were to have full liberty of conscience, and the
free exercise of all such modes of religious worship _as were not
prohibited by law_.
In the same year the Rev. Dr. O'Donnell came out to Newfoundland as
its prefect apostolic. But the liberal movement did not last long.
Lord Shelburne retired, and from 1784 till the passing of the Reform
Bill in 1832 the Tories mismanaged the affairs of Great Britain and
her colonies.
One great advantage of American independence was that it gave the
world a fair chance of judging between the results of republican and
royal government in colonial affairs.
We have certainly much that is rotten in the United States; but, when
we compare our republic at its worst with British colonial
administration, we can find good reason to be thankful for the
crowning mercy of 1781, when Washington, Lafayette, and De Grasse
gained their decisive victory over the troops of King George.
I will not now refer to England's use of her immense power in India,
China, and Japan. As I watched the course of the Congress of Religions
at Chicago in 1893, I could not help thinking that the impressions
taken from that Congress by our Oriental visitors would bear fruit
that in due course may teach even his Grace, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, something about England's criminal neglect of Christian
duty to these people. For us it is enough to compare our position with
that of the two unfortunate islands nearer our own shores, Ireland and
Newfoundland.
Suppose we had been cursed with the rule of British Tories since 1783,
is it likely that our condition would have been better than that of
these islands?
Even such small instalments of justice as Mr. Gladstone has been able
to secure through his splendid fight for "justice to Ireland" are due
far more to the pressure exercised on England by the Irish in America
than to British sense of right. Poor Newfoundland has had no Ireland
in America to help her. She has been among the most loyal of England's
colonies, and because of her loyalty she has been the most shamefully
treated.
It might be expected that Irish Catholics would emigrate in large
numbers to Newfoundland to escape the infamous penal laws by which
King George oppressed them in Ireland, and that sailors from all parts
of Great Britain would seek there a shelter from the press-gangs at
home. Dr. O'Donnell, the first regularly authorized Catholic priest on
the island, applied in 1790 for leave to build a chapel in an outport;
and, the Tories being in power, Governor Milbanke replied: "The
Governor acquaints Mr. O'Donnell [omitting the title of Rev.] that, so
far from being disposed to allow of an increase of places of religious
worship for the Roman Catholics of the island, he very seriously
intends next year to lay those established already under particular
restrictions. Mr. O'Donnell must be aware that it is not the interest
of Great Britain to encourage people to winter in Newfoundland; and he
cannot be ignorant that many of the lower order who would now stay
would, if it were not for the convenience with which they obtain
absolution here, go home for it, at least once in two or three years.
And the Governor has been misinformed, if Mr. O'Donnell, instead of
advising his hearers to return to Ireland, does not rather encourage
them to winter in this country. On board the 'Salisbury,' Nov. 2,
1790."
Do we need clearer proofs than that to show us who is responsible for
the misery both of Newfoundland and of Ireland? This Catholic priest,
to whom the Tory governor refuses both his religious rights and the
titles given him by his church and university, knew how to return good
for evil.
In 1800 a mutinous plot was concocted among the soldiers of the Royal
Newfoundland Regiment to desert with their arms, and, being joined by
their friends outside, to plunder St. John's, and afterwards escape to
the United States. Fortunately, Dr. O'Donnell, who had meanwhile
become bishop of St. John's, discovered the plot, and not only warned
the commanding officer, but exerted all his own influence among the
Catholics of the town to prevent outbreak.
The British government gave him the miserable pension of L50 a year,
while they pay one of L6,000 a year to the Duke of Richmond, for no
better reason than that he was descended from the bastard son of that
Louise de la Querouaille who was the French mistress of King Charles
II.
Chief Justice Reeves had been sent out from England to report on the
condition of the country; and his "History of the Government of
Newfoundland" shows that the ascendency so long maintained by a
mercantile monopoly for narrow and selfish purpose had prevented the
settlement of the country, the development of its resources, and the
establishment of a proper system for the administration of government.
Soon afterwards, in 1796, Admiral Waldegrave was appointed governor.
The merchants of Burin complained to him that some of their fishermen
wanted to emigrate to Nova Scotia. The merchants desired to prevent
this.
Admiral Waldegrave reported thereon: "Unless these poor wretches
emigrate, they must starve; for how can it be otherwise, while the
merchant has the power of setting his own price on the supplies issued
to the fishermen and on the fish that the people catch for him? Thus
we see a set of unfortunate beings worked like slaves, and hazarding
their lives, when at the expiration of their term (_however successful
their exertions_) they find themselves not only without gain, but so
deeply indebted as forces them to emigrate or drive them to despair."
He further relates how the merchants refused to allow a tax of
sixpence per gallon on rum, to help them to defray administrative
expenses; and he describes the merchants as "opposed to every measure
of government which a governor may think proper to propose for the
general benefit of the island."
But even this Governor Waldegrave, though he so clearly saw the true
cause of the evil, sternly refused the only remedy within reach, which
was to grant the poor wretches the right to use the waste,
uncultivated land which existed in so great abundance round about
them.
He was so far from doing this that, when about to leave, he put on
record, in 1799, for the use of his successor, that he had made no
promise of any grant of land, save one to the officer commanding the
troops, and that was not to be held by any other person. That is the
way in which Britain's Tories have cared for her colonies.
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.