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 L900,000 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 L20,000 and
L40,000 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 L400,000 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. L4,375,000 was extorted from the
Chinese emperor for the expenses of the war ($20,000,000), and
L1,250,000 ($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'etat_ 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.
It was on March 7, 1862, that Lord Robert Cecil said in Parliament:
"The plain fact is that the Northern States of America can never be
our sure friends, because we are rivals politically, rivals
commercially. We aspire to the same position. We both aspire to the
government of the seas. We are both manufacturing people, and, in
every port as well as at every court we are rivals of each other....
With the Southern States the case is entirely reversed. The people are
an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry,
and they consume the products which we make from it. With them,
therefore, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly
relations; and we have seen that, when the war began, they at once
recurred to England as their natural ally."
It was easy enough for the most cowardly man, in Lord Robert Cecil's
position, to use such words, even were he naught more than a lath
painted over to imitate steel. Even if England is ruined, he is safe.
But it was quite another matter when, sixteen years later, the poor
Newfoundlander applied to him and Disraeli-Beaconsfield for the right
to build a railroad.
Russia had just declared her intention of demolishing the last
unpleasant clause in the treaty forced upon her by France and England
at the close of the Crimean War; and Russia was a more dangerous foe
than the Northern States. And the story of the Beaconsfield-Salisbury
connection with that affair excited the laughter of all other
diplomatists in Europe.
They pretended to have brought peace with honor from the Conference of
Berlin. But what did the rest of Europe think about it?