"By jingo, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
We've got the money, too."
In almost every case in which a British investor has lost his money in the United States it can be proved that some British expert or financial agent earned a large sum by inducing him to invest.
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. for the most divine purpose. It is due to the influence of the money-lending class that England has so completely lost the grip of heart and brain on her imperial duties.
It is said that John Bull pays a tax of $700,000,000 a year to the liquor interest, to say nothing of the indirect damages resulting from the fact that the liquor interest is the chief supporter of the brothel, the baccarat table, and the Tory Democracy. The beerage has proved of late years also a highway to the peerage; and it has also served to deplete the pockets of a good many British fools, who were misled into the insane delusion that they could earn as much from the profits of American guzzling as from those of British beer-drinking. 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.
On investigating the published accounts of some twelve American brewery companies in which Englishmen have been induced to invest more than $41,808,000, I find that the depreciation in selling price of shares, taking the highest rates of November, 1894, was no less than $21,917,280, or 52.42 per cent. on the paid-up capital; and, taking the common stock alone, the loss exceeds over seventy per cent. on the paid-up capital.
I am glad of it. The Englishman who, knowing the influence of this infernal traffic on his own countrymen, would make money by extending its curse to the United States, deserves to lose his money quite as much as the Tory investors in the Confederate Loan deserved their loss. Now suppose this $70,000,000 thus invested in "Alabama damages," Confederate Loan, and American breweries had been put into Newfoundland roads and railways, what would have been the result? An immense amount of traffic which now must pay toll to American railroads would have gone over purely British lines, all the way through British America to China and Japan. All the mining and agricultural lands of Newfoundland might have been developed. The French shore question would have ceased to occupy the diplomatic wiseacres, because the people would have found so much profit in other employments as to care nothing about French competition in the cod and lobster fishery. Newfoundland itself would have become an impregnable arsenal for the British navy, commanding the entrances to the St. Lawrence, and, in case of war with the United States, giving that navy the power of practically blockading all the Atlantic coast.
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. It rejected Mr. Gladstone when he sought the suffrages of South-east Lancashire that he might relieve Ireland from the insolent domination of an alien church.
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. Of eighteen such corporations whose shares are quoted in the Economist, the highest November prices of common stock show a loss of $2,553,294 on the paid-up capital. Supposing that, instead of supporting the Jingoes, Manchester had sent men to Parliament who would support a wise and conservative policy in the colonies, Newfoundland included, would it not have been better for her interests, to say nothing of principle?
The Newfoundlanders in Boston, Mass., held a public meeting there on the 16th of February, at which the Rev. Frederick Woods, their chairman, said: "If we could only take our old island, and lay her at the feet of Uncle Sam! I wish we could." And every suggestion of annexation to the United States was applauded by the Newfoundlanders present.