One of the questions which an outsider always asks of Canada and of which the Canadian never thinks is—­Why is Newfoundland not a part of Canada?  Why has the lonely little Island never entered confederation?  On the map Newfoundland looks no larger than the area of Manitoba before the provincial boundaries were extended to Hudson Bay.  In reality, area has little to do with Newfoundland’s importance 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 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