Newfoundland and the Jingoes: an Appeal to England's Honor

Part 1

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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.

Part 2

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.

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