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 pass 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 class 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 principal 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 Massachusetts 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 Assembly 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, passing measures, and voting moneys, the Council, which was composed of nominees of the crown, selected exclusively from the merchant class, could throw out all their measures, and were irresponsible to the people.