Proudly fighting

Or is it fightly prouding?

Either way.... to listen to the First Blue Kool-Aid Division, Danny has given us pride. He is fighting, fighting, fighting for us, because no one ever thought to fight before. Why, there are even unconfirmed reports that children were never even toilet-trained before Danny came along.

What then, to make of the following bit of prose, which has the inconvenient quality of pre-dating Danny Williams' arrival on the political scene?

Their history has been so tragic that Newfoundland was long ago called "the Cinderella of the Empire"... Yet there is more stubborn pride of country in every cubic inch of the average Newfoundlander than will be found in a cubic foot of any other people.

[...]

Newfoundlanders are great battlers. They must be great battlers: they have been battling against this or for that ever since the first settler landed here. Battling for the opportunity of getting a berth on one of the West-Coast English fishing-vessels coming on a summer's voyage to Newfoundland in the early days of the Island's discovery; battling for an opportunity to desert the vessel before she returned to England with her cargo of codfish in the autumn of the year; then batttling to hew a humble home out of the virgin forest that grew to the salt water's edge in some small cove far along the coast out of site or knowledge of the English fishing-vessels coming to our coast each summer in those early years; battling against Nature and the elements to wrest a living from the sea and the forest while they were building homestead; battling against the dreaded surprise attacks of pirates, English men-o'-war, "Fishing Admirals"; battling against the merciless, ruthlessly determined efforts of the early fish-merchants to amass fortunes out of the toil of the Newfoundland fishermen: against official stupidity and private greed; against betrayal, treachery, double-dealing and downright theft: against all thes and many other evils had the early Newfoundlanders to battle.

Nor has there been a time ever since when there seemed much less need to struggle and fight.

The much-advertised English bull-dog courage and the equally publicised Irish love of a fight have both found their greatest need of expression here in Newfoundland, from the dawn of our history to the very present.

[...]

I do think we Newfoundlanders need to have something said to diminish our rather swashbuckling pride of country and militant patriotism... Always keeping one eye upon the possible accusation of the psychologist that such insisten patriotism must really denote the existence of an inferiority complex deep down within us, I hail this pride of the Newfoundlander in his country as one of the most promising media by which Newfoundland will overcome her troubles and carve a great future for herself.

If Danny is the wellspring of pride, if Danny is the first to fight, then how can a body account for this literary anachronism? How can there possibly have been proud fighting before Him? How?