Part 3

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 £800 a year. Catherine Sedley, the mistress of James II., had another of £5,000 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 £5,000. Lady Walsingham, daughter of the first-named of these mistresses, had an Irish pension of £1,500; and Lady Howe, daughter of the second, had a pension of £500. Madame de Walmoden, mistress of the German Protestant King George II., had an Irish pension of £3,000. 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 £200 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 £732,000; 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 £1,110,000 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?