John Fretwell

“ America while she was united ran a race of prosperity unparalleled in the world. Eighty years made the republic such a power that, if she had continued as she was a few years longer, she would have been the great bully of the world. ”

“ To-day, but for the emasculating [6] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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? ”

“ All other dangers which lure men to venture everything for excitement or for fortune, the torrid [11] heat or arctic cold, the battle against man or beast, the desert or the jungle, all land adventures are as nothing compared to the daring of the hourly existence of the heroic souls whose lives are cast upon the banks of Newfoundland. The fishermen may seem wild and reckless, rough and illiterate; but supreme danger and superlative sacrifice breed noble qualities, and beneath the rough exterior of the fisherman you will never fail to find a MAN, and no cheap imitation of the genuine article. ”

“ At any rate, these immense investments in American railroads, loans, and lands, have one great advantage for the United States. They bind over England to keep the peace toward us. There is no more unpatriotic, no more unmoral, no more cowardly man than the British financial agent and money-lender. If only the security is good, he will rather lend money at 4-1/8 per cent. for the most devilish than at 4 per cent. ”

“ I need hardly say that Newfoundland is not the right place for such men; but, under a just and wise imperial government, it can be made a happy home for thousands of hardy Scotch and Irish peasants, who need not, in crossing the ocean, change their political allegiance. But England must first do her duty.
She must build her railroad from Port aux Basques along the French shore to Bonne Bay, or further north, so as to give the people a means of communication which shall not be impeded by the French treaty rights ”

“ 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 [36] 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. ”

“ None but a man can face for a second time the frown of the North Atlantic, that exhibition of mighty, all-consuming power, beside the sober reality of which all the ecstasies of poets and painters are puny failures. ”

“ Surely, the country that made so much profit out of the slave-trade is bound to compensate Newfoundland for the losses caused by its weakness in the French shore question rather than that France which in 1713 abandoned the infamous traffic to the British Tories. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let her modify her fiscal system so as to give a real free trade, not only to the Newfoundland fisherman, but also to those of Great Britain and Ireland, so that the foreigner shall not be able to deprive British subjects either of their home or foreign markets. A small import duty on all fish imported into the British Isles, except from Newfoundland, and a bounty on the exports equal to that given by France, will suffice. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The French bounties do not hurt the Massachusetts fishermen, because we have a home market which the Frenchmen cannot touch, and seek only a foreign market for the very small quantity that our own people do not consume. And to share in this American home market alone would be more profitable to Newfoundland than all its connection with England can ever be. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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, 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. ”

“ They are justified in their desire; for England has been disloyal to them, and holds the island by no better right than that by which Turkey holds Armenia.
Let that England, who expects every man to do his duty, do her own. Let her, first of all, relieve the suffering.
Second. Let her press on the completion of the railroad at English expense to Port aux Basques as quickly as possible, and subsidize a mail line between England and the American Continent by way of a Newfoundland port, holding the railroad property as security for money expended. ”

“ It is well that the people of the United States propose to celebrate its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year; for, more than any other event in their colonial history, it gave them confidence in the power of untrained men of spirit to overcome the hireling soldiers of the European governments.
But the action of the British government at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in restoring this fortress to the French, gave the colonists an equally necessary lesson. What did England get in exchange? ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the south-eastern extremity of Cape Breton Island the strong fortress of Louisbourg, which it was once the fashion to call the Gibraltar of America, threatened the safety of the New England and Newfoundland fisheries alike. Governor Shirley of Massachusetts induced the legislature to undertake an expedition against this fortress, and intrusted its command to Colonel William Pepperell. The New England forces, raw troops, commanded by untrained officers, astonished the world by capturing a fortress which was deemed impregnable. ”

“ But to us Americans the words have their lessons also. Newfoundland not only belongs to our Continental system, [10] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Much depends on the point of view from which a man writes; and I can only say that, if the distinguished Major-general is right, from a purely British point of view, in depreciating the island and its resources, he thereby furnishes a very strong argument why Great Britain should, for a reasonable compensation, cede this island to the United States. ”

“ America has been infested for some time by a crowd of Englishmen, who came here hunting options on American breweries, which they sold at a high price to their English dupes. In one case some breweries, which cost the owners less than $2,000,000, were sold in England for $6,000,000, the Englishmen and Americans who managed the transaction making enormous profits at the expense of their dupes. ”

“ And now the great makers of cotton machinery are coming from Lancashire to establish factories in New England, and her spinning and weaving mill corporations are losing their markets and their profits. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 [46] always open, by which they have an easy communication with Canada and the United States ”

“ All this has been thrown away, because the British Jingo supports a Tory cabinet, which, while making theatrical demonstrations of imperialism, neglects imperial duties and betrays imperial interests.
And look even at sober free trade Manchester, the community which is supposed to understand the worth of money better than any other in the world. Has it really gained by its Jingo policy? Professing to be the stronghold of free trade, it rejected the great free-trader, John Bright, when in Sir John Bowring's war he asked for justice to China. ”

“ 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. ”