THE MISSIONS 245 
well able to judge, as he spent much time visiting per- 
sonally from place to place when patrolling with his ships 
in the western part of the North Atlantic. He writes: — 
“On our visit round the island we met with sights 
enough to sicken one, and we felt ashamed to think that 
these poor creatures were British subjects like ourselves. 
On part of Labrador the people were actually starving last 
winter, owing to a bad fishing season, and many would 
have starved altogether had it not been for a steamer 
wrecked on their coast, loaded with bullock and flour.”’ 
The same observer, writing in 1881, says: — 
“These poor people, ground down as they are by the 
detestable ‘ truck system,’ live and die hopelessly in debt, 
living from hand to mouth without a shilling to call their 
own. Possibly education may in time awaken them to a 
sense of their degradation, but at present there seems no 
remedy for this evil. A bad season throws hundreds of 
these unfortunates upon the government, and no less than 
$100,000 is paid out annually in pauper relief among a 
total population of 180,000.” 
On my own first cruise along the Labrador coast, coming 
straight from a happier land, I was deeply impressed with 
the ruling terror of poverty and semi-starvation implied 
by the conditions then prevailing. The nakedness of the 
people was an insistent and deplorable feature ever facing 
the doctor as his calling made him a witness of the mean 
material, miserable flannelet or cotton, within the reach of 
a folk living in a subarctic climate. The wretched monot- 
ony of their cheap (truly the most expensive) foods; the 
small, bare, squalid huts; the ignorance and apathy of 
men and women; the absolute neglect of the crudest sanita- 
