ma,"
will become in the near future an indispensable necessity of our
national existence.

Since the English people seem to have taken to heart, far more than
his own countrymen have done, the lesson taught by our Captain Mahan
in his "Influence of the Sea-power in History," it is well that we
should consider the past history of England's relations to that
first-born colony which she has so infamously sacrificed, and for
whose misfortunes she alone is responsible.

The lesson that we may learn from that history is quite as much needed
by the American as by the Briton. Edmund R. Spearman, writing in the
_Westminster Review_ (Vol. 137, page 403, 1892), says:--

"No English Homer has yet risen to tell the tale of Newfoundland,
shrouded in mystery and romance, the daring invasion and vicissitudes
of those exhaustless fisheries, the battle of life in that seething
cauldron of the North Atlantic, where the swelling billows never rest,
and the hurricane only slumbers to bring forth the worse dangers of
the fog-bank and the iceberg. Fierce as has been during the four
centuries the fight for the fisheries by European rivals, their petty
racial quarrels sink into insignificance before the general struggle
for the harvest. The Atlantic roar hides all minor pipings. The breed
of fisher-folk from these deep-sea voyagings consist of the toughest
specimens of human endurance. All other dangers which lure men to
venture everything for excitement or for fortune, the torrid heat or
arctic cold, the battle against man or beast, the desert or the
jungle, all land adventures are as nothing compared to the daring of
the hourly existence of the heroic souls whose lives are cast upon the
banks of Newfoundland. The fishermen may seem wild and reckless, rough
and illiterate; but supreme danger and superlative sacrifice breed
noble qualities, and beneath the rough exterior of the fisherman you
will never fail to find a MAN, and no cheap imitation of the genuine
article. None but a man can face for a second time the frown of the
North Atlantic, that exhibition of mighty, all-consuming power, beside
the sober reality of which all the ecstasies of poets and painters are
puny failures. Among these heroes of the sea England's children have
always been foremost. We should expect England to be especially proud
of such an offspring, familiar with their struggles, and ever heedful
of their welfare, lending an ear to their claims or complaints above
al