"Even if we were disposed to do so, we cannot in our position as a naval power view with indifference the disaster to, and possibly the ruin of, a colony we may sometimes regard as amongst the most valuable of our naval stations. Neither can we view the position without consideration for the wide-spread suffering that an absolute refusal to grant assistance would entail. It is probable that a cheaper system of administration would retrieve the position without casting an overwhelmingly heavy burden upon the imperial tax-payers. If we interpret public feeling aright, it will be in favor of giving the colony the help that may be found essential; but, if the assistance required takes anything like the radical proportion that at present seems necessary, it can only be granted at a price,--the surrender of the Constitution and the return of Newfoundland to the condition of a crown colony." While we may safely concede to the editors of the _Times_ as much "consideration for wide-spread suffering" as to a Jay Gould or a Napoleon, the above-quoted words are significant, because they show that what the ruling powers in England would never concede to charity or justice they will give to self-interest, now that the _Times_ has discovered "there is money in it." But to us Americans the words have their lessons also. Newfoundland not only belongs to our Continental system, but it can never be really prosperous until it becomes a State in our Union. What it is to-day, New England might have been, had it not been delivered by the Continental forces, and by the French navy, from the rule of British Tories. And, as a member of our Union, this island, five times the size of Massachusetts, might not only be as prosperous as Rhode Island or Connecticut, but also the chief training ground for our future navy, which, checked by the piracies of the British-built "Alabama," 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:--