Newfoundland and the Jingoes Part 2

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 pa.s.sing 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 Gra.s.se 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 j.a.pan. 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 sh.o.r.es, 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tles 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 50 a year, while they pay one of 6,000 a year to the Duke of Richmond, for no better reason than that he was descended from the b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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.

No sooner was Napoleon seated on the consular throne--he had not then become emperor--than he addressed a letter to King George III., urging the restoration of peace. "The war which has ravaged for eight years the four quarters of the globe, is it," he asks, "to be eternal?"

"France and England," he concludes, "may, by the abuse of their strength, still for a time r.e.t.a.r.d 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, p.r.o.nounced 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 sh.o.r.es. I do not blame the French for insisting that England shall scuttle out of Egypt before she yields her claims in Newfoundland; but it is the responsible English, and not the innocent Newfoundlanders, who ought to pay the cost, and the conduct of England in insisting that Newfoundland shall bear the burden is cowardly and mean beyond all expression.

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

Englishmen were taxed in order to give the German despots money wherewith to fight the French. Austria received for one campaign more money than England had to pay even for the "Alabama" claims, and the czar of Russia received 900,000 for the eight months his troops were in the field. During the same war the king's second son, the same Duke of York who had given so characteristic a sample of Guelph generalship in leading his forces to defeat, gave an equally characteristic specimen of Guelph morality. He had for mistress one Mary Ann Clarke, a woman of low origin, who transferred her intimacy to a Colonel Wardle, and confided to him many of the secrets of her relations to the royal duke. Wardle, on Jan. 27, 1809, affirmed in the House of Commons that the Duke of York had permitted Mrs. Clarke to carry on a traffic in commissions and promotions, and demanded a public inquiry.

Mrs. Clarke was examined at the bar of the House of Commons for several weeks, displaying a shameless, witty impudence that drew continual applause and laughter from a mob of English _gentlemen_, many of whom knew her too well. The charges were proved, and the Duke of York resigned his position as commander-in-chief; and the disclosures made--doctors of divinity suing for bishoprics, and priests for preferment, at the feet of a harlot, kissing her palm with coin--may teach Englishmen what they have to guard against even to-day on the part of that Tory party that has religion, conscience, and morality much more on its lips than in its heart.

It is not altogether irrelevant in this connection to mention that in 1825, when the Catholic relief bill had pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d_."

England has indeed had to pay dearly for her hereditary monarchy, and for the awful hypocrisy which permits the appeal to G.o.d 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 sh.o.r.e; but the Tories were at the helm, and became fellow-conspirators with other tyrants of Europe in perpetrating the most monstrous wrong and the completest restoration of despotism that was conceivable, in Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, everywhere.

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

Let us now turn to Newfoundland itself. While the nations were fighting, its merchants had enjoyed the monopoly of the cod-fisheries.

Some of the capitalists had secured profits between 20,000 and 40,000 a year each, but they made the poor fishermen pay eight pounds a barrel for flour and twelve pounds a barrel for pork. They took their fortunes to England. No effort was made to open up roads or extend agriculture; for, if it had been done, the landlords of England would not have been able to sell their pork and wheat at such exorbitant prices there.

So, when the war ceased and other nations were enabled to compete in the fisheries, the colony had to pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s lost a sum little short of 400,000 sterling.

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

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

The other was the deportation of the princ.i.p.al 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 a.s.sembly 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, pa.s.sing measures, and voting moneys, the Council, which was composed of nominees of the crown, selected exclusively from the merchant cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing 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.