anchored in stones.  There are not even many children; for the children are off to sea soon as they can don top-boots and handle a line.  There is the store of “the planter” or outfitter—­a local merchant, who supplies schooners on shares for the season and too often holds whole hamlets in his debt.  There is the church.  The priest or parson comes poling out to meet your ship and get his monthly or half-yearly mail, and there are the little whitewashed cots of the fisher folk.  It is a simpler life than the existence of the habitant of Quebec.  It is more remote from modern stress than the days of the Tudors.  On the north and west shore and in that sea strip of Labrador under Newfoundland’s jurisdiction and known in contradiction to Labrador as The Labrodor—­are whole hamlets of people that have never seen a railroad, a cow, a horse.  They are Devon people, who speak the dialect of Devon men in Queen Elizabeth’s day.  You hear such expressions as “enow,” “forninst,” “forby”; and the mental attitude to life is two or three centuries old.

“Why should we pay for railroads?” the people asked late as 1898.  “Our fathers used boats and their own legs.”  And one hamlet came out and stoned a passing train.  “Checks—­none of your checks for me,” roared an out-port fisherman taking the train for the first time and lugging behind him a huge canvas bag of clothes.  “Checks—­not for me!  I know checks!  When the banks busted, I had your checks; and much good they were.”  This was late as ’98, and back from the pulp mills of the interior and the railroad you will find conditions as antiquated to-day.

If Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a Greater Britain Overseas, why is she not part of Canada?  Because Canada refused to take her in.  Because Canada had not big enough vision to see her need of this smallest of the American colonies.  For the same reason that reciprocity failed between Canada and the United States—­because when Newfoundland would have come in, Canada was lethargic.  Nobody was big enough politically to seize and swing the opportunity.  Because when Canada was ready, Newfoundland was no longer in the mood to come in; and nobody in Newfoundland was big enough to seize and swing an opportunity for the empire.

It was in the nineties.  Fish had fallen to a ruinous price and for some temporary reason the fishing was poor.  There had been bank kiting in Newfoundland’s financial system.  She had no railroads and few steamships.  Her mines had not been exploited, and she did not know her own wealth in the pulp-wood areas of the interior.  In fact, there are sections of Northern Newfoundland not yet explored inland.  Every bank in the colony had collapsed.  Newfoundland emissaries came to Ottawa to feel the pulse for federation.  The population at that time was something under two hundred thousand.