is the call, the dare, the risk, the romance of the sea born
in their own blood. Or else watch the fishing fleets up off the North
Shore, down on the Grand Banks! The schooner rocks to the silver swell
of the sea with bare mast poles. A furtive woman comes up the hatchway
and gazes with shaded eyes at passing steamers; but the men are out in
the clumsy black dories that rock like a cradle to the swell of the
sea, drawing in--drawing in--the line; or singing their sailor
chanties--"Come all ye Newfoundlanders"--as meal of pork and cod
simmers in a pot above a chip fire cooking on stones in the bottom of
the boat. It isn't the one or two hundred dollars these fishermen
clear in a year--and it may be said that one hundred dollars cleared in
a year is opulence--that holds them to the wild, free, perilous life.
It is the call of the sea in their blood. Of such men are victorious
navies made, and if Canada is to be anything more than the hanger-on to
the tail of the kite of the British Empire, she, too, must have her
navy, her men of the sea, born and cradled and crooned and nursed by
the sea. That is Newfoundland's first importance to a Greater Britain
Overseas.

Perhaps, if the present war had not broken out, Canada would never have
realized Newfoundland's second importance to a Greater Britain Overseas
as the outpost sentinel guarding entrance to her waterways. It would
require shorter time to transport troops to Newfoundland than to Suez.
Should Canada ever be attacked, Newfoundland would be a more important
basis than Suez. Two centuries ago, in fact, for two whole centuries,
St. John's Harbor rang to the conflict of warring nations. If ever war
demanded the bottling up and blockading of Canada, the basis for that
embargo would be Newfoundland.

It may as well be acknowledged that Canada's east coast affords few
good land-locked harbors. Newfoundland's deep-sea land-locked harbors
are so numerous you can not count them. Your ship will be coasting
what seems to be a rampart wall of sheer black iron towering up three,
four, six hundred feet flat as if planed, planed by the ice-grind and
storms of a million years beating down from the Pole riding thunderous
and angry seas. You wonder what would happen if a storm caught your
ship between those iron walls and a landward hurricane; and the captain
tells you, when the wind sheers nor'-east, he always beats for open
sea. It isn't the sea he fears. It is these roc