Newfoundland and the Jingoes Part 3

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. 4,375,000 was extorted from the Chinese emperor for the expenses of the war ($20,000,000), and 1,250,000 ($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 a.s.sistance. 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 a.s.sert 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 G.o.d. 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 Roma.n.u.s 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 sh.o.r.es 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. Peac.o.c.ke, 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 const.i.tuents, 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 mult.i.tude still affect to antic.i.p.ate 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?

It made the Christian populations of the South believe that Russia was their especial friend, and their enemies were England and the unspeakable Turk; it strengthened among the Greeks the impression already made by Palmerston's action in the Don Pacifico case,--that France was their friend, and England their enemy; and it created everywhere the impression that the Congress was a theatrical piece of business, merely enacted as a pageant on the Berlin stage.

England has not yet paid the full penalty of her stupid acquiescence in the rule of Disraeli and Salisbury; and it will cost her yet far more than she paid for the results of Tory infamy and Whig senility in the "Alabama" business, for she has enemies to deal with who are far less generous and far slyer than the people of the United States. It was under the Beaconsfield-Salisbury cabinet that Sir Bartle Frere made that infamous declaration of war against Cetewayo which led to the defeat of Lord Chelmsford's British troops by a lot of half-naked savages. It was under this ministry that the stupid expedition to Afghanistan led to the ma.s.sacre of Sir Louis Cavagnari and the members of his staff. It was under this ministry that the soul-stirring anthem of Thompson,

"When Britain first at Heaven's command,"

was superseded by the rant of the Tory street-walker,--

"We don't want to fight; But, by jingo, if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, We've got the money, too."

And the manner in which the government used the ships, the men, and the money, proved that there was one thing needful which the Jingoes had not got; and that is manhood.

To this Jingo ministry it was, then, that Sir William V. Whiteway had to apply for the imperial sanction to the railway; and sanction was _refused_. For what reason? The _pretended reason_ was that the western terminus of the line at Bay St. George would be on that part of the coast affected by the French treaty rights. It may be open to doubt whether the French claims which interfered with the establishment of a railroad terminus at Bay St. George were just or not; but there is not the slightest doubt that Lord Palmerston, in his note of July 10, 1838, to Count Sebastiani, had maintained that they were not justified, and that the Tories were and are of the same opinion.

But when a whole colony of Englishmen were wronged according to the statements both of Palmerston and Salisbury, the Beaconsfield-Salisbury administration _dare_ not maintain the rights of these Englishmen against the French. That is the courage and the bravery of British Jingoism, which bullies weak China and little Greece in support of a Sir John Bowring or Don Pacifico, but dares not maintain an Englishman's rights against the French republic.

The question might easily have been settled without offending France by making Port aux Basques, which is less than eighty miles south-west of Bay St. George and beyond the French treaty limits, the terminus of the line.

There must, then, have been some concealed reason behind the pretended one. It is absolutely certain that there were two influences at work in London which were directly antagonistic to the true interest both of Great Britain and Newfoundland. One was that of the Canadian party, who are determined to boycott every scheme that would make any Newfoundland port a rival of Halifax. The other is the British, or mercantile, party, who for two hundred years past have consistently and successfully opposed the introduction of any industry into the island that would enable the fishermen to escape from their present bondage.

If either Beaconsfield or Salisbury had really cared for England's interests, they must have foreseen that, even if they were willing to sacrifice Newfoundland, the position they took in this matter must in the highest degree be damaging to the European prestige of Great Britain. When republican France was threatened by all the tyrants of Europe, the terrible Danton said, "Il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace." To-day the Frenchman requires no Danton to teach him the lesson; for the extraordinary confession of weakness made by the Jingo government of 1878 in refusing to sanction a line that could have been built without touching the French sh.o.r.e question at all was a direct encouragement to the French to persevere in that policy which they have since so successfully pursued in Madagascar, in Siam, in Africa, and in Newfoundland.

No matter whether the French claims in Newfoundland be right or wrong, the Beaconsfield-Salisbury government have practically surrendered the matter; and the only thing left for the British government is to compensate Newfoundland for its loss, as America was compensated for the "Alabama" damages. But they will not do it.

Mr. Whiteway had to find another means of helping the colony. He was obliged to choose between two alternatives,--either to build no railway at all or only one which would avoid the very districts which, for the benefit of the settler, ought to opened for settlement.

So the line to Harbor Grace was built. But even this the wealthy British did not build. It was left to an American syndicate. P.T.

McG., writing of this line to the New York _Weekly Post_ of Jan. 2, 1895, says, "The contract was given to an enterprising Yankee, who built a few miles, swindled the shareholders, fleeced the colony, and then decamped, leaving as a legacy an unfinished road, an interminable lawsuit, and a damaged colonial credit."

I happen to know another side of the question; and it does not become the Englishmen interested in that railway matter to talk of "Yankee swindlers."

When Sir Robert Thorburn became Premier of Newfoundland, he took the first step necessary to make this line of some value to the tax-payers by extending it twenty-seven miles to Placentia, the old French "La Plaisance." This line was of immense value to St. John's, because it gave the people of that city a convenient winter harbor which is always open, by which they have an easy communication with Canada and the United States; and I hope the time will soon come when we shall have steamers running from Boston, touching at the French Island of St. Pierre, and then going to Placentia.

What were the English diplomatists doing meanwhile? In 1890 they were arranging a _modus vivendi_ with the French government about the lobster fisheries. The Tories were in power, and Sir James Ferguson was the Under-secretary of State. This gentleman's sentiments towards the United States have been recorded by the Hon. James G. Blaine. In his "Twenty Years of Congress," Vol. II., page 481, foot-note, he writes: Sir James Ferguson declared in the House of Commons, March 14, 1864, that "wholesale peculations and robberies have been perpetrated under the form of war by the generals of the Federal States; and worse horrors than, I believe, have ever in the present century disgraced European armies have been perpetrated under the eyes of the Federal government, and yet remain unpunished. These things are as notorious as the proceedings of a government which seems anxious to rival one despotic and irresponsible power of Europe in its contempt for the public opinion of mankind." These words need no commentary to-day.

They show us pretty clearly the character of the man who then spoke them, and will prepare us for his treatment of the Newfoundland question. On March 20, 1890, he made the following statement in the House of Commons:--

"The Newfoundland government was consulted as to the terms of the _modus vivendi, which was modified to some extent to meet their views_; but it was necessary to conclude it without referring it to them in its final shape."

Five days later the Governor of Newfoundland telegraphed to the Secretary of State:--

"My ministers request that incorrect statement made by Under-secretary of State for foreign affairs be immediately contradicted, _as the terms of modus vivendi were not modified in accordance with their views_. Ministers protested against any claims of French, and desired time to be changed till January for reasons given; but that was ignored, and _modus vivendi_ entered into without regard to their wishes. Ministers much embarra.s.sed by incorrect statement made by Under-secretary of State."

Of course the Secretary of State supported the statement of Sir James Ferguson, and refused to correct it. But on page 54 of the case for the colony, published June, 1890, we find the words:--