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 shores 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. Peacocke, 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 constituents, 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 multitude still affect to anticipate 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 massacre of Sir Louis Cavagnari and the members of his staff. It was under this ministry that the soul-stirring anthem of Thompson,