Shore, down on the Grand Banks!  The schooner rocks to the silver swell of the sea with bare mast poles.  A furtive woman comes up the hatchway and gazes with shaded eyes at passing steamers; but the men are out in the clumsy black dories that rock like a cradle to the swell of the sea, drawing in—­drawing in—­the line; or singing their sailor chanties—­“Come all ye Newfoundlanders”—­as meal of pork and cod simmers in a pot above a chip fire cooking on stones in the bottom of the boat.  It isn’t the one or two hundred dollars these fishermen clear in a year—­and it may be said that one hundred dollars cleared in a year is opulence—­that holds them to the wild, free, perilous life.  It is the call of the sea in their blood.  Of such men are victorious navies made, and if Canada is to be anything more than the hanger-on to the tail of the kite of the British Empire, she, too, must have her navy, her men of the sea, born and cradled and crooned and nursed by the sea.  That is Newfoundland’s first importance to a Greater Britain Overseas.

Perhaps, if the present war had not broken out, Canada would never have realized Newfoundland’s second importance to a Greater Britain Overseas as the outpost sentinel guarding entrance to her waterways.  It would require shorter time to transport troops to Newfoundland than to Suez.  Should Canada ever be attacked, Newfoundland would be a more important basis than Suez.  Two centuries ago, in fact, for two whole centuries, St. John’s Harbor rang to the conflict of warring nations.  If ever war demanded the bottling up and blockading of Canada, the basis for that embargo would be Newfoundland.

It may as well be acknowledged that Canada’s east coast affords few good land-locked harbors.  Newfoundland’s deep-sea land-locked harbors are so numerous you can not count them.  Your ship will be coasting what seems to be a rampart wall of sheer black iron towering up three, four, six hundred feet flat as if planed, planed by the ice-grind and storms of a million years beating down from the Pole riding thunderous and angry seas.  You wonder what would happen if a storm caught your ship between those iron walls and a landward hurricane; and the captain tells you, when the wind sheers nor’-east, he always beats for open sea.  It isn’t the sea he fears.  It is these rock ramparts and saw-tooth reefs sticking up through the lace fret.  Suddenly you twist round a sharp angle of rock like the half closed leaf of a book.  You slip in behind the leaf of rock, and wriggle behind another angle—­“follow the tickles o’ water” is, I believe, the term—­and there opens before you a harbor cove, land-locked, rock-walled from sea to sky, with the fishermen’s dories awash on a silver sea, with women in brightly colored kirtles and top-boots and sunbonnets busy over the fishing stages drying cod.  Dogs and hogs are the only domestic animals visible.  The shore is so rocky that fences are usually little sticks