UNFAVOURABLE FEATURES OF THE SETTLEMENT. 199

repulsive aspect of the scenery which might have awakened the disparaging reflection of the Roman. On something like the same grounds, from which such a disparaging reflection was formed, we may account for the depreciatory epithets employed by the Governors of Newfoundland in speaking of the country subjected to their periodic sway.

For, consider the circumstances under which the Governor took a view of the condition of the country. He generally arrived in the month of August at a place in which, though there was growing up year by year an increasing number of resident inhabitants, yet these residents had no legal right to appropriate a spot of ground or to set up a house, excepting such persons as were furnished with the precarious title contained in a conditional grant conferred by some previous governor. Consequently, the habitations were generally of the meanest description, mostly put up by stealth during the winter, when the governor was away. (The interval between the departure of one governor and the arrival of his successor was the busiest season for fencing off ground, and running up huts and stores.) The new dwellings were huddled close to some former erection, the better to escape notice; thus making material for a swift conflagration, in case of a fire breaking out in any one of them. On these houses there was no lavish bestowment of the luxury of paint, for that might give too marked a change to the aspect of the place in the eye of one who had seen it a year before. Such being the sort of habitations and such the manner of their irregular

extension in the midst of stages, flakes, and other appurtenances of the fishery, small relief was afforded to the picture in the agricultural or horticultural possessions of the people, for to obtain land for such purposes was almost prohibited, the very sight of a growing cabbage or a green potato plot suggesting to the jealous guardian of the rights of the fishery the idea of encroachment. Such were the components of the landscape presented to the Governor in the harbour of St. John's during the summer season; and this being considered the best sight in the island, it is no wonder that when he was sailing away in the beginning of November through the thick and chilly fogs floating for many a league on the fishing banks, as he thought of those compelled to spend the winter inside the folds of that vapoury curtain, he was thankful that he was being borne away from that desolate country.

But while the common idea of the island, so far as any idea of it was common, was thus unfavourable to its drawing towards it the respectable emigrants, who make it a matter of choice as to where they will pitch the tents of a new home, there were classes to whom the very features which repelled others constituted an attraction. It were unjust to speak disparagingly of the earlier settlers in Newfoundland, or even of the bulk of those who at a later period took up their abode there. The colonists introduced by Sir John Calvert in Avalon, and those whom Mr. Guy brought to Conception Bay under the auspices of the London Company, were doubtless a chosen order of people,

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whose character and habits adapted them to be the proper founders of new communities. Of those, too, who came to the fishery year by year, and who saw, under the unsightly aspect of the land, the signs of a place which might some day afford a better prospect to their children than the crowded shores of the Old World, it is probable that a large proportion were such men as go to form the strength of any State. Indeed, no one can read the records of the colony without being struck by the many letters from persons in the different outposts, as well as from parties in St. John's, indicative of men strong in their healthy individualism both of an intellectual and a moral

kind.

Still, there was another stamp of people than the above mentioned, to whom Newfoundland became a favourite and a welcome refuge. In an early chapter of this work quotation has been made of the representation that the country was 'a sanctuary for men that broke in England.' Of the thousands who annually visited it in the summer, there were those who found it convenient to stay, leaving their debts behind them in the old country, and in some cases leaving the encumbrances of wife and children behind them too. Ireland furnished an ever augmenting throng of people whom want had demoralised, or oppression had made mad. Times of riot and convulsion in that country were always followed by the migration of numbers who in Terra Nova found friends to shelter them from penalties incurred, and eager to hear them tell the story of the wrongs of their native land. After the

rebellion in 1798 there were many who in this way found a refuge from the fetters of a prison, or perhaps a worse and sharper fate.

While the population of the island was gradually forming in this manner (and the process went on through generations), what was being done to transmute these elements into an orderly, a moral, loyal and religious people? The answer which the history yields is, nothing at all, or next to nothing. The governors and magistrates were continually descanting on the evils of an irregular immigration. Proclamations were issued, forbidding the fishermen to remain in the country after the voyage was over. Hardships were inflicted on the settlers so as to make the island an undesireable place for any but the bravest or most desperate to live in. But scarcely any provision was made to promote the education of the people, either for the duties of this life, or the interests of the next. There were settlements on which successive generations were born, lived and died without the advantages of religious ordinances. Marriage was a rite which in hundreds of instances. the people had to perform for one another, which they often did without a strict regard to ecclesiastical prohibitions against alliances of consanguinity. On this latter point there is on record the testimony of a clergyman placed over a district in which better order was becoming established, testimony which shows the debasing influence of looser habits still lingering in the sentiments of the people. Writing to Governor Waldegrave this clergyman states that he had been

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requested to officiate at an incestuous marriage, and on his refusal, the man had gone home with his intended bride, had got his servant to read the marriage service, and the union was consummated. What is specially remarkable about this case is the fact, that when it was submitted to the Crown lawyers at home, they were not sure that the law of England could be made effectual in Newfoundland, to prevent or punish such outrages against social propriety and decency.

While thus a considerable portion of the Protestant inhabitants were left to their own devices, without any religious teacher to guide them in matters affecting the very existence of social order and virtue, another and a larger class of the people, the Roman Catholics, were prohibited by law from receiving the ministers whom their faith taught them to revere, and from exercising any of the rites of their Church. Not until 1784 did a Catholic priest find himself at liberty to perform the functions of his office among the thousands of his communion who had made their home in Newfoundland.

Is it wonderful, under such circumstances, that disorder and crime should be rife-when such a state of things prevails? That they were abundant is evident from the Records of the colony, during the latter half of the eighteenth century. These memoranda not only tell of isolated offences, which, though shocking enough when seen in their singleness, yet may perhaps be paralleled by examples in more advanced communities, but they indicate a corruption of the mass in some remote settlements, bringing forth