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GIBRALTAR: FORTRESS OR COLONY?

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FOR close upon two hundred years Gibraltar has been an English possession, held in the face of sudden assault, protracted siege, and peated negotiation for diplomatic surrender. Yet the conditions of its tenure have still to be exactly decided; the responsibilities, moral and political, which it imposes on its rulers are unsatisfactorily defined; its general character-fortress colony-is not a point on which there is any practical unanimity of opinion. Since the English standard first waved over the Rock Gun, these questions, after having been to all appearance settled by the voice of Parliament, and the unmistakable declarations of the national will, have again and again been mooted on some plea of justice, or of policy. The issues of the dispute have been gradually narrowed, and the withdrawal of the British garrison from the rock which guards the Mediterranean, instead of being advocated, as it once was, by each of the great political parties of the state in succession, has become the dream of a few philosophers of humanity. Still, events are at the present moment passing in the history of Gibraltar which remind one that the ancient competition between the military value and the commercial usefulness of the place is not yet ended, and that the degree of obligation entailed on its present lords continues to have its place in the regions of controversy.

Many important questions are suggested by the draft ordinance laid upon the table of the House of Commons last session for establishing a code of customs - regulations at Gibraltar. Does the exceptional geographical relation of an English settlement to a foreign state demand from the English Government certain

commercial restrictions, demonstrably detrimental to the trade of such settlement? The simplest manner of answering that inquiry is to say that considerations of trade can have nothing to do with our occupation of Gibraltar, which is purely a military stronghold. But though this reply has been already actually made in the London press, the fact remains that a considerable, and, as will be seen, a perfectly legitimate trade has sprung up on and around the Rock, and that these commercial excrescences could only be removed by something very like the confiscation of existing interests. As, therefore, the wholesale abolition of the Gibraltar trade appears impracticable, it remains to be seen what can be done in the way of regulation. The subject is one which Parliament will shortly have to settle. All that need be attempted here is to mention certain facts relevant to the point, which will have both novelty and interest for an English public, as well as to indicate, by reference to a few episodes in the chronicles of the Rock, the wider interests with which the problem is charged, and, it may be, the altered guise in which old differences have now reappeared.

Gibraltar had no sooner been proclaimed the property of the English crown, than it became the bone of party contentions, which may be regarded as foreshadowing most of the political differences whose cause it has subsequently been. Sir George Rooke's victory of July 1704—the year of the battle of Blenheim-was admitted at the time to be a glorious one, and was attended, on its announcement, with the customary share of rejoicings. But the seizure of the Rock, and the appropriation of it in the name of England, were condemned by the Whig critics of the period

as in direct contradiction of the laws of political and national morality. Anxious to identify himself with the acquisition of a stronghold whose importance for England he at once recognised, Rooke gave orders that the Imperial banner of Charles III., in whose cause the capture had been effected, should be hauled down, and the Royal standard of England hoisted in its stead. The city was then declared to belong to her most Gracious Majesty Queen Anne, and eighteen hundred English seamen were landed to occupy the place, the acquisition of which immediately became a party question. Rooke's Tory friends lauded the achievement with indiscreet enthusiasm, and compared the victor of Gibraltar and Malaga to the conqueror of Blenheim. The Whigs stigmatised the feat as insignificant in itself, and noticeable only for the dishonesty which had accompanied it. The heroes of Blenheim and Gibraltar became the rival watchwords of the two political parties in the state, and competing addresses reached the sovereign from all parts of the country.

Subsequently to the Treaty of Utrecht, by which it was formally yielded to Great Britain, negotiations for the surrender of Gibraltar to Spain were continued over a long series of years.

George I. suggested to the Spanish government, through the medium of the Regent of France, the possibility of the restoration of Gibraltar upon certain conditions, and for five or six years the king was perpetually sending confidential agents to negotiate with the Spanish government on the understanding that a suitable equivalent should be forthcoming. To minimise this equivalent was the object of Spain; indignant outbursts from parliament and the country were the sole comments on the transaction vouchsafed by England.

The siege of Gibraltar-the first since it had been in the hands of the English, the thirteenth in its historyfollowed, and established the fact that

the fortress was from the land side

a

impregnable. Shortly after peace between Spain and England was concluded, the old negotiations began again. Then, as now, the Spanish government complained that the English occupation of the Rock afforded immunity to smugglers. Then, as now, there were charges of alleged seizures made by Spanish ships, and counter-charges preferred by Spanish officials. The elder Pitt himself, who was at the head of affairs, recognised that the possession of even stronghold so valuable had its disadvantages; and in a secret despatch, dated August 23, 1751, to the English ambassador at Madrid, Sir Benjamin Keene, authorised him to offer the cession of Gibraltar to Spain, on condition that she would enter into an alliance with England against the French. But the offer came too late, and England was still to be burdened with what Pitt and other statesmen of the day did not hesitate to call an incubus. The national enthusiasm for Gibraltar had greatly diminished; the expenses of the place had risen to a proportionately high figure, and the administration of the local government was notoriously bad. "I grow weary of this place," wrote Tyrawley, the governor of Gibraltar, to Henry Fox, in 1757. "That Gibraltar is the strongest town in the word, that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen, and that London Bridge is one of the seven wonders in the world, are the natural prejudices of an English coffeehouse politician. As for Gibraltar, I do not see that we do ourselves much good, or anybody else any hurt, by our being in possession of it." Tyrawley's views no doubt had much weight with Pitt, and the press teemed with attacks by pamphleteers of all political denominations against the corruption and abuses of the government of the Rock.

Even while the famous siege was actually in progress, negotiations between England and Spain for the cession of Gibraltar were renewed.

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In 1782 Mr. Bankes brought forward
a motion in favour of surrender in the
House of Commons. He had scarcely
sat down when Fox sprang to his feet,
and denounced with impassioned elo-
quence the pusillanimous proposal."
The fortress of Gibraltar," he said,
was to be reckoned amongst the
most valuable possessions of England.
It was that which gave us respect in
the eyes of nations; it manifested our
superiority, and supplied us with the
means of obliging them by protection.
Give up to Spain the fortress of Gib-
raltar, and the Mediterranean became
to them a pool, a pond in which they
can navigate at pleasure, and act with-
out control or check." Burke followed
in the same vein. "No other post
(and Oran, it may be mentioned, had
been suggested as an equivalent)
"which the Spaniards could give us,
had the same or anything like the
same recommendations-as a post of
war, a post of power, a post of com-
merce, and a post which made us
valuable to our friends, and formid-
able to our enemies." A few months
afterwards Lord Shelburne again
mooted the subject, and a draft treaty
on the basis of the cession of the Rock
was actually prepared. The Shel-
burne Cabinet at once fell, and North
and Fox came into power on the
avowed platform of "No surrender."
This was the last of the long series of
abortive negotiations. Fox congratu-
lated the country on having finally
taken its resolve, and Florida Blanca,
the Spanish minister, who himself, and
through his agents, had been busily at
work, was compelled to confess that
there were "national prejudices in
England which superseded all other
reasonings." The utmost that Spanish
valour and diplomacy could do had
been accomplished. Spanish armies
had been sacrificed, the Spanish ex-
chequer was exhausted. Gibraltar
"defended by the English, had an-
swered to the gallant summons to
surrender; plutonically, with mere
torrents of red-hot iron-as if stone
Calpe had become a throat of the

Pit, and had uttered such a Doom's blast of a No as all men must credit."1

Thus far Gibraltar has been viewed as a stronghold, resolutely defended against military assault and diplomatic manoeuvre. It remains to be seen whether it possesses any of those aspects and opportunities of civilian commerce, which are essential to a colony. In a society, mainly military, and in a place of which the most stirring associations are military exclusively, it is inevit able that the occupation of the trader should be ignored or misrepresented. The idea of a mercantile society, conducting its operations in a perfectly legitimate manner, and on a scale of considerable importance, is altogether foreign to the ordinary conception of Gibraltar. The visitor to the Rock sees a flotilla of small craft in the bay, and a number of respectably clad persons in the street, who have obviously nothing to do with the garrison. He is led to conclude, from the remarks of his military cicerone, that these represent the smuggling interest. "Scorpions" and smugglers are indeed pretty generally employed as convertible terms, and as for the commerce of Gibraltar, the current notion is that it is composed entirely of the traffic in contraband goods.

The administration of Gibraltar can only be described as an anomaly. The governor is a military man, who is also commander-in-chief of the garrison, but who in his capacity as governor receives no military pay, his salary being derived exclusively from civil sources. Yet that there are civil, in addition to military, duties for the governor to discharge has been traditionally ignored. The first ruler of the Rock to recognise the fact that he had civil as well as military functions was his Excellency Sir George Don, who in 1814 established the Gibraltar police. Sixteen years later the first charter of justice was given to the city 1 Carlyle's French Revolution, Book II chap. v.

of Gibraltar, a magistracy was established, civil liberty was accorded to its population, and the Rock was emancipated from the reign of purely military law. But the struggle between

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the two elements-the martial and commercial was not yet at an end, and indeed may be said only to have come to a head in 1856. The then governor of the Rock, Sir Robert Gardiner, a man of vigour and ability, but who believed that trade and commerce of all kinds should be rooted out, did not disguise his wish to destroy every trace of civil government, and to expel the mercantile community that had grown up under it. He excluded the members of the Exchange Committee from the State entertainments at Government House. Without the sanction of the legislature he issued an ordinance, subsequently revoked, for "prohibiting unlicensed printing."

He pro

tested in a long letter to Lord Palmerston that until Gibraltar again became a military fortress only-in other words, until the charter of 1830 was withdrawn troublesome altercations between England and Spain would continue. The Exchange Committee petitioned the Crown for a Consultative Council, Sir Robert Gardiner declared that such a body could only be "a tribunal of appeal for the propagation of smuggling." Quarantine he condemned as the handmaid of smuggling. He went into an elaborate argument to show that the commercial system of Gibraltar involved a violation of the clause in the Treaty of Utrecht, under which England held the Rock. Finally, he dwelt on the "insignificance of the persons engaged in trade at Gibraltar," consisting in all, according to his account, of " seven British, three Spanish, and four other foreign merchants."

The Gibraltar traders addressed a memorial to her Majesty, in which they repeated at some length Sir Robert Gardiner's allegations, particularly drawing the attention of the Colonial Office to the fact that instead

of the merchants being limited to fourteen individuals, they embraced the representatives of thirty-two British firms, having houses in Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, as well as of fifteen Spanish, Italian, German, Danish, and American firms. Her Majesty's Government declined to adopt Sir Robert's suggestions, and Sir Robert Gardiner was himself reprimanded for having exceeded his instructions.

It is undeniable that Great Britain was compelled from the first to recognise the commercial character of her Mediterranean possession. The Order in Council proclaiming Gibraltar a free port for ever, was only issued by Queen Anne's ministers in 1705 under pressure of manifest necessity. The Emperor of Morocco refused to allow the export of the timber, lime, bricks, and other materials required for the fortifications of the place except on the condition that Gibraltar was made a free port as well for the Moors as the Jews. Before 1710 it had become a valuable entrepot for the distribution of British manufactures to the Barbary states and to the different countries bordering on the Mediterranean. "Progressively increasing," writes Mr. Montgomery Martin,1 "Gibraltar became at length the centre of a commerce, which, con sidering the number of its inhabitants, was perhaps without its equal in the world. An idea of the extent to which it was carried may be judged from the fact that in one year the value of British manufactured goods imported into Gibraltar direct from England, and exclusive of colonial produce, was nearly 3,000,000l." The facts and statistics of the present are, however, of more importance than those of the past. Nor is it necessary here to trace the successive stages by which the fortress of Gibraltar attained its existing importance as a commercial station. The number of oceangoing steamers frequenting the port of 1 History of the British Colonies, vol. v.

P. 100.

Gibraltar is between two and three thousand a year. At present custom-house regulations and supervision do not exist, and the only expense imposed on ships anchoring in the harbour is represented by the port-dues. Vessels of every calibre and of all nations are free to come and go without inspection or detention. This freedom, coinciding as it has done with the development of steam navigation, has made the port one of regular call for craft arriving from, and bound to, every quarter of the globe-the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, North and South America. The emporium of an extensive commerce, Gibraltar naturally affords employment for a large number of labouring men, and creates a custom for the purveyors of provisions and supplies of every kind. English and colonial manufactures and other merchandise exported from England to Gibraltar are almost entirely conveyed in large steamers en route to ports lying to the eastward. Obviously it is of the utmost moment that the transshipment of these goods should be expeditious and inexpensive. "Wool, grain, wax, and other produce from Morocco❞—it is stated in a memorial presented to Lord Carnarvon by the members of the Gibraltar deputation which was in London a few months ago-" fruit, wine, oil, and other produce from Spain, are sent to Gibraltar for transshipment to England, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, America, ports in the Mediterranean, India, and China. With the exception of India and China this produce is sent without any previous knowledge of the exact vessel which will convey it from Gibraltar, but in reliance upon the fact that vessels for all those places constantly call there." In the case of India and China the enforcement of the restrictions now contemplated must destroy the carrying trade conducted by the mail steamers. The risk of delay, and the heavy penalties which delay entails, will compel these to leave Gibraltar out of their calculations.

There is another sort of traffic which

is now threatened. The ordinance proposed by the Colonial Office, and consisting of seventy-nine clauses, may be briefly described as rendering'impossible any movement of merchandise of any description in the port or town of Gibraltar, whether for export or import, without custom-house supervision or intervention. It is said that some of these clauses may be relaxed in favour of large steamers belonging to wellknown lines. That, as no provision for it is inserted in the ordinance, will be an affair for the discretion of the custom-house officers, while it is diffi cult to see how such exceptions can be made without the effect of invalidating the entire scheme. But Gibraltar is a place of retail as well as wholesale trade. The coast of Morocco, Spain, and Portugal is lined with small gardens and farms, whose owners bring or send their produce in ships of slight burden to the population of the Rock, purchasing there with the proceeds of their cargoes little ventures of Gibraltar merchandise. An embargo will virtually be laid on these by the new customs regulations, and the probability, or rather the certainty, is, that they will seek another market, the most likely spot for which is Oran.1

That in this latter class of craft a considerable amount of smuggling into Spain is done cannot be denied, the contraband articles imported being not only tobacco but Manchester goods;

1 "On our side," writes Senor Montero, deputy to the Cortes for the district contiguous to Gibraltar, "it must be stated very distinctly that Gibraltar is for the towns of the neighbouring districts the universal market in which our corn, our garden produce, game, fish, and cotton, are disposed of. . . . It is a centre which maintains numbers of labourers whom the farmer could not pay if he had not a ready and convenient sale for his produce. All these will suffer inevitably from the consequences of any impoverishment of Gibraltar.

Spain possesses a numerous body of carabineres, and a fleet sufficient to guard her coasts. These are ample for the purpose of preventing smuggling, without requiring that ancient rights should be set at naught, with the additional result of injuring Spanish and English subjects."

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