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bring nations together, but to keep them apart," is cheered by the reflection that these misguided advisers are no longer of one mind. Even members of the Army Council "are said to be favorable" to the scheme. When we ask for some evidence not merely that military or naval experts have changed their opinions, but that they have done so with good reason, we fail to see any material change between the situation to-day and the situation in 1883. The reassuring considerations which are now offered us turn, with one remarkable exception, to be noticed presently, on the alleged ease of rendering the tunnel useless in the event of its becoming a source of danger. The list of expedients available for this purpose is more imposing than reassuring. It could be blocked or blown up so easily that there would be no need of destroying it even in the case of war. The supply of air could be stopped, and the invading army asphyxiated. The French promoters are willing to carry the approach to the entrance on their side across the open sands, so that the invading force would be exposed on its way to the tunnel to the fire of the British fleet. It will be seen that these safeguards are all directed against the same danger-the danger that the tunnel will be utilized for the landing of the first invading force. But this is not at all the only or even the chief use that might be made of it in time of war. The way in which it would probably threaten our safety is of a different kind. Let us imagine that a small invading force-one of those "raids" against which even the blue water school will not promise us absolute security-has effected a landing from boats, and succeeded in occupying for a short time the country near Do

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paired “at comparatively small cost.” That cost would no doubt be forthcoming, and the tunnel would then serve for the passage of as large an army as the French Government thought well to send. No doubt if that more complete destruction which General Turner naturally deprecates had been effected, this risk would be avoided. But its removal only introduces another. The responsibility of destroying some twenty millions of property by merely pressing a button is so burdensome that it is conceivable, to say the least, that the button might not be pressed in time. The man on the spot would be waiting for the final order. The men at headquarters would argue that the fact of his being on the spot made him the best judge whether the right moment had come. The machinery of destruction when applied on a great scale might not operate with the same certainty that had characterized it in the experimental trials, and in the end the mouth of the tunnel might be in the enemy's hands, and the damage done to it not be beyond repair. It is even possible that the premature destruction of the tunnel, the result of a sudden access of over-caution, might be the last disturbing factor in the relations between us and France, and so precipitate hostilities.

All these sources of risk, however, pale before the terrors of the last safeguard which the advocates of this project hold out to us. General Turner pleads that an international agreement that the tunnel shall not in any contingency be utilized for purposes of war "is not beyond the range of practical politics," and the Daily News ends by disavowing the possibility of devising means for the sudden destruction of the tunnel, and holds that it is "in the way of neutralization that the safeguards against panic or danger are to be sought." In consideration of an increase in the imports from the Conti

nent, and the comfort of week-enders with a taste for foreign countries, we are to reduce England to the level of Belgium or Switzerland, to subject her to the disadvantages attendant upon the exchange of a sea frontier for a land one, and to give her in exchange such problematical security as is afforded by the doubtful willingness of the other Powers to enforce a neutrality which they might not be sorry to see broken. The neutralization of Belgium has not prevented the German staff from including in their calculations in the case of war the march of a German army on the northern frontier of France, and the Swiss are not more easy, in view of a possible violation of their own frontiers, neutralized though they be. We are grateful to both our advisers for indicating thus plainly the price which we are in the end to pay for the Channel tunnel. We are to give up the sea in consideration of the questionable security of a European guarantee. The truth is that the adThe Economist.

vantages and the dangers of a Channel tunnel do not admit of comparison. The promoters of the scheme are in the position of a surgeon who advises a patient to submit to a highly dangerous internal operation in order to gain exemption from colds in the head. The consequences of the Channel tunnel falling into other hands than ours are incalculable. All we can say of them is that at their worst they might mean a national overthrow, too complete to leave any hope of recovery. We are asked to set this tremendous, if remote, calamity, against increased trade, unification of gauge in the English and French railways, and the doubtful benefit to the French estimation of England involved in the increasing crowds of English excursionists. All these blessings put together would be dearly bought even if they brought us nothing worse than the panics which we should have from time to time to endure in order to make them our own.

THE BARONESS BURDETT-COUTTS.

In this remarkable woman, who is amongst the victims of the winter, the country has lost a figure belonging preeminently to that Victorian era which we seem already to have left behind. To elderly men and women of the present day the Baroness Burdett-Coutts is associated with the memories of their youth as a type of the Lady Bountiful; to the younger generation she is little more than a name. There must be few indeed who can recollect the Baroness as a bright ornament of the Court of the young Queen, as the great lady whose personality fascinated, whose entertainments were the talk of the town. But slightly the senior of her Sovereign, she seems in many ways to have illus

trated in the subject those qualities which especially endeared the ruler to her people. Unbounded kindness of heart combined with a sober judg ment, an emphatic recognition of the common humanity of rich and poor, and a tender solicitude for those trials of the family which afflict all alikethese were qualities shining brightly both in the late Queen and in the wealthy lady who was her early friend. Probably nothing made Queen Victoria more widely popular than her prompt and kindly messages of sympathy with the sufferers from some mining accident or disaster at sea, the personal note struck at once and meeting with a ready and heart-felt response through

out the nation. So in many of the more notable benefactions of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts the personal element was conspicuous. The provision through the Shoe-black Brigade of a means of livelihood for the boys of London, the rescue from starvation of the fishing population of Cape Clear, the feeding of destitute school children, the women's home at Shepherd's Bush, are examples of the direct character of her alms-giving and of the keen sympathy with actual sufferings which it indicated. Of that assistance to individuals, rendered-if report speak truewith such lavish and yet discriminating kindness, it is impossible to write; but in her more public acts it is still the direct attempt to alleviate suffering which is largely conspicuous. Lady Burdett-Coutts grew up in an age when well-doing was less vexed by doubts and less vigorously questioned as to its ultimate results than is now the case. She gave freely, and she gave in the full confidence that the men and women and children to whom she gave would be the better for her giving. Far-off results in the permanent raising of national life were perhaps less in her view than the relief of immediate want and the shedding of some rays of sunshine on dreary lives. Nothing, perhaps, shows more signally her deep kindness of heart and quickness of imagination than her efforts to improve the lot of domestic animals. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would never have attained to its present position of widespread usefulness-how wide is its sphere of action every magistrate knows-but for Lady Burdett-Coutts's support; and she showed her generous and wise belief in human nature, as well as her humanity, in making it a point of honor with a costermonger to drive a well-kept

handsome beast.

Lady Burdett-Coutts was, indeed, The Speaker.

very far from being the mere giver of money. She could undertake an enterprise of pith and moment and carry it into execution. The endowment of a colonial bishopric, the construction of a church and schools in a poor districtsuch acts as these were princely examples of liberality following accustomed lines. It was a much more original conception, at the time, to buy up the whole of a slum district and build model dwellings on its site, or to found a new market. Success may not have attended every attempt of this kind to ameliorate town life; but such efforts as hers have paved the way for munieipal action on a larger scale and for the more careful study of the problems of overcrowding which distinguishes the present day. An impatience with the slow working of private benevolence, a rebellion against the economic conditions which make abject poverty possible in a civilized community, are features of the thought of to-day which were unknown when Lady BurdettCoutts entered upon her life of benefi

cence.

But the present eagerness to abolish suffering might never have existed but for such notable attempts to cope with the ills of mankind as those of Lord Shaftesbury, Lady BurdettCoutts, and other early social reformers. Lady Burdett-Coutts recognized the obligation on a citizen of great wealth to apply that wealth to the benefit of the less fortunate of her fellowcountrymen. Such a recognition of the duties of citizenship works in many ways. It not only stimulates imitation, but sets people thinking; and the unrest of the present time in the face of dire poverty and trouble may be in no small degree due to the conspicuous efforts of great philanthropists to do good after a simple and direct fashion to those who struck them as most needing their assistance.

THE SEA.

A famous writer, I think it was Thackeray, said to a serious young man, "Do you like the play?"

"Which play?" was the guarded an

swer.

"You great stupid! I mean The Play."

ter expressed than in that delightful book of the late Frank Stockton, "The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine." It is not that these good ladies were matter-of-fact-Defoe was matter-of-fact-but that for them there was no sea, only quantities of water.

But,

These remarks are necessary to emphasize the truth that the fascination of the sea does not depend upon the size of it or upon long voyages. on the other hand, that the fascination of the sea is not a mere poetical convention is proved by the fact that the two finest living writers about the sea are, or have been, professional sailors

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So to all sea-lovers, professional or amateur, the sea is just The Sea, and the facts that it is a large body of salt water, a navigable element, or even "a weak solution of drowned men" are merely incidental. I would go further and say that unless you are born with the sea in your heart you will never find it, though you may become aware of the incidental facts mentioned above. There is something ludicrously "Pierre Loti" and Mr. Joseph Conineffective about the highly-colored work of art hung up outside post offices and police stations to illustrate the advantages of joining the Royal Navy. Opportunities of seeing the world, provisions to the value of 1s. 6d. a day, the pleasant uniform of a chief warrant officer, the prospect of a pensionI'll venture to say that the young man who is induced to join the Navy by these baits never really goes to sea at all. Do the authorities think that a boy runs away to sea because he wants to go to China or to become an admiral? Some men are constitutionally incapable of going to sea. I do not mean that they are made ill by it; very often they are what is called "good sailors." They may go to China and Peru, may cross the Line and double the Horn, but they never go to sea. The sea remains for them so much water; to be crossed, perhaps, even to be enjoyed. It is not that they are stupid or unobservant; it is merely that they are immune from the sea as a man may be immune from measles. Nowhere has this immunity from the sea been bet

There is, by the way, curious material for the psychologist in the reflection that while we English are accepted as rulers of the sea, a Frenchman and a Pole are to-day its most vivid interpreters. More than that, it was another Frenchman, Victor Hugo, who beyond any man insisted on the true conception of the sea, that conception which is at the same time classical and the child's, of the sea as a personality, or, as the Greeks said, Poseidon. Read "Les Travailleurs de la Mer," and you will never again think of the sea as a large body of salt water. Once admit this conception, and it no longer seems remarkable that the sea upon which Ulysses wandered was so very small. Homer's conception of the sea was the true and enduring one. Wherever there is salt water there is Poseidon. The mystery of the sea is not in the size of it, nor is its terror in its power of drowning or battering. You may be suffocated by an escape of gas or battered to death in a cab accident, but you do not think of gas or cabs as implacable

deities. It is this character of the sea as a single and mighty personality that secures it for ever in the minds of men from the blighting effects of mechanical invention. Steam and electricity do not destroy the romance of the sea except for those who are incapable of feeling it.

The sea, any sea, may for the purposes of human emotion-which is the only thing that matters-be divided into the open sea and its borders. To the open sea belongs chiefly the character of mystery. It is in the open sea that all the unexplained tragedies which are summed up in the word "missing" take place. The spell of calms, the glamour of tropical nights, the strange fury of cyclones, all the phenomena which affect the human imagination with a sense of the preternatural are associated with the open sea. But, oddly enough, it is at the borders of the sea that you are made aware of its sharper terrors. At the meeting of sea and land occur most of the tragedies and heroisms that stir the blood with pity or pride. To the sailor in wild weather the pressing danger is not from the sea, but from the land. Lighthouses have their topographical uses, of course, but their chief message to the sailor is "Keep away."

This peril of the land is forcibly brought home to me to-day. The room in which this article is being written looks out upon the Atlantic. For three days now a gale has been blowing in from the North, and as far as one can see the bay is filled with a rabble of gray waves breaking in a continuous roar like that of a dozen express trains. At the cliff's edge you can lean upon the wind as you lean on a railing. All along the shore the rocks are encrusted with half-dried rusty foam like the bloody froth on the jaws of an infuriated beast. Looking down into a partially sheltered cove, it is filled with what looks like the quivering yellow

fleeces of sheep. It is a compound of sand and foam churned up from the cauldron of the sea. For many yards inland the air is filled with flying yellow flakes, as big as your hand, beaten by the storm to the tough texture of whipped white of egg. Every time the sea meets an isolated rock a column of white spray flies up 100ft. or more into the air. The noise of the concussion is drowned in the general roar. A moment later the black rock is veined with gleaming threads as the water pours back into the sea. But all this noise and tumult is less significant of the real peril to sailors than the fact that here, where ordinarily there passes much coasting traffic, for three days there has not been visible anywhere a sail or the smoke of a steamer. It is the nearness, the homeliness of so many sea-tragedies that gives them their poignancy. Less than two years ago a large barque was wrecked near the Land's End, with the loss of twenty-three lives. The history of the day and night preceding the disaster, as given by survivors at the inquest, was one of the most thrilling stories I have ever heard. But the astonishing thing was that the three men who were saved jumped ashore from the wreck. It was as near a thing as that. circumstances of the final struggle were so awful that in speaking of them, a man who had seen the vessel beating about on the previous day, a mild man, a lover and painter of the sea in all its moods, broke into curses and shook his fist at the now smiling and purring water at our feet. Looking down into the cove it was hard to believe that that little pile of matchwood was all that remained of a barque of 2000 tons.

The

There is a picture that will always live in my memory as an illustration of the sea perils which endure to the very confines of the land. On a bright Sunday morning last spring I was idly

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