The name which the English have given to this last is strangely characteristic. The Bay of Hope (Baie d'Espoir) of the French has been changed into the Bay of Despair of the English. It was really a Bay of Hope to the French; for from the head of one of its fiords, deep enough for the largest of our modern ships, an Indian trail goes northwards in less than 100 miles to the fertile valley of the Exploits River. Can we suppose that the French engineers would have allowed 200 years to elapse without building a road along this trail? And yet not a single road was built by the English conquerors before the year 1825; and even to-day, to reach the point where the Indian trail crosses the Exploits, we must travel 260 miles by rail from Placentia or St. John's instead of 100 from Bay d'Espoir, simply because the English holders of property in St. John's, like dogs in the manger, will not permit any improvement in the country, unless it can be made tributary to their special interests. That the English were worse enemies of Newfoundland than the French, even in King Charles's time, may be seen from the advice given by Sir Josiah Child, the chairman of that great monopoly, the East India Company, that the island "was to have no government, nor inhabitants permitted to reside at Newfoundland, nor any passengers or private boat-keepers permitted to fish at Newfoundland." The Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations adopted the suggestion of Sir Josiah; and in 1676, just a century before the American Declaration of Independence, the west country adventurers began to drive away the resident inhabitants, and to take possession of their houses and fishing stages, and did so much damage in three weeks that Thomas Oxford declared 1,500 men could not make it good. We should be unjust if we were to regard this infamous dishonesty as simply an accident of the Restoration time. Many of my American readers have doubtless heard of an island called Ireland, which is much nearer to England than Newfoundland. Lecky tells us how the English land-owners, always foremost in selfishness, procured the enactment of laws, in 1665 and 1680, absolutely prohibiting the importation into England from Ireland of all cattle, sheep, and swine, of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and even of butter and cheese, with the natural result that the French were enabled to procure these provisions at lower prices, and their work of settling their sugar plantations was much facilitated thereby.