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 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? 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, pronounced 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 shores. 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.