to
England's possessions in North America. It is that part of America
nearest to Europe. If you measure it north to south and east to west
it seems about two hundred and fifty by three hundred and fifty miles;
but distance north and south, east and west, has little to do with
Newfoundland's importance to the empire. Newfoundland's importance to
the empire consists in three fundamental facts: Newfoundland is the
radiating center for the fisheries on the Grand Banks, that submarine
plateau of six hundred by one hundred and fifty miles, where are the
richest deep-sea fisheries in the world; Newfoundland lies gardant at
the very entrance to Canada's great waterways; and Newfoundland's coast
line is the most broken coast line in the whole world affording
countless land-locked, rock-ribbed deep-sea harbors to shelter all the
fighting ships of the world.

What have the deep-sea fisheries of the Grand Banks to do with a
Greater Britain Overseas? You would not ask that question if you could
see the sealing fleets set out in spring; or the whaling crews drive
after a great fin-back up north of Tilt Cove; or the schooners go out
with their dories in tow for the Grand Banks fisheries. Asked what
impressed him most in the royal tour of the present King of England
across Canada and Newfoundland several years ago, a prominent official
with the Prince answered: "Newfoundland and the prairie provinces."
"Why?" he was asked. "Men for the navy and food for the Empire." That
answer tells in a line why Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a
Greater Britain Overseas. You can't take landlubbers, put them on a
boat and have seamen. Sailors are bred to the sea, cradled in it,
salted with it for generations before they become such mariners as hold
England's ascendency on the seas of the world. They love the sea and
its roll and its dangers more than all the rewards of the land. Of
such men, and of such only, are navies made that win battles. Come out
to Kitty Vitty, a rock-ribbed cove behind St. John's, and listen to
some old mother in Israel, with the bloom of the sea still in her
wilted cheeks, tell of losing her sons in the seal fisheries of the
spring, when men go out in crews of two and three hundred hunting the
hairy seal over the ice floes, and the floes break loose, and the
blizzard comes down! It isn't the twenty or thirty or fifty dollar
bonus a head in the seal hunt that lures them to death, in darkness and
storm. It