before. Modern methods were introduced, and the artificial propagation
of cod and also of lobsters was begun. In 1898 a Department of Marine
and Fisheries was set up, and with the minister in charge of it an
advisory Fisheries Board was associated.

Though the cod-fishery is the largest and the most important of the
Newfoundland fisheries, the seal, lobster, herring, whale and salmon
fisheries are also considerable, and yield high returns. As to all
these fisheries, the right to make regulations has been placed more
effectively in the hands of Great Britain by the Hague arbitration
award, which was published in September 1910, and which satisfied
British claims to a very large extent.

A pathetic chapter in the history of colonization might be written
upon the fate of native races. A great English authority on
international law (Phillimore) has dealt with their claims to the
proprietorship of American soil in a very summary way.

"The North American Indians," he says, "would have been entitled to
have excluded the British fur-traders from their hunting-grounds; and
not having done so, the latter must be considered as having been
admitted to a joint occupation of the territory, and thus to have
become invested with a similar right of excluding strangers from such
portions of the country as their own industrial operations covered."

It is better to say frankly that the highest good of humanity required
the dispossession of savages; and it is permissible to regret that the
morals and humanity of the pioneers of civilization have not always
been worthy of their errand.

It rarely happens that the native, as in South Africa, has shown
sufficient tenacity and stamina to resist the tide of the white
aggression: more often the invaders have gradually thinned their
numbers. The Spanish adventurers worked to death the soft inhabitants
of the American islands. Many perished by the sword, many in a species
of national decline, the wonders of civilization, for good and for
bad, working an obsession in their childish imaginations which in time
reacted upon the physique of the race.

Sebastian Cabot has left a record of his standard of morality in
dealing with the natives. When he was Grand Pilot of England it fell
to his lot to give instructions to that brave Northern explorer, Sir
Hugh Willoughby:

"The natives of strange countries," he advises, "are to be enticed
aboard and made drunk with your beer and wine, for then you s