uct 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 justi