TWENTY-FIVE years ago this Review was instrumental in helping to stop a scheme for destroying the insularity of England by means of a railway to be made under the Channel, and thereby joining the soil of Great Britain to the soil of the Continent.

It was a scheme of private speculators and company-promoters, and, as soon as its character was realised by the public, it was promptly repudiated and dismissed by the common sense of the country.

A Public Protest which appeared in these pages was signed by all sorts and conditions of men, and backed by almost the whole Press. It ran thus: 1

THE undersigned—having had their attention called to certain proposals made by commercial companies for joining England to the Continent of Europe by a Railroad under the Channel, and feeling convinced that (notwithstanding any precautions against risk suggested by the projectors)

VOL. LXI-No. 360

See page 1 of Supplement.

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such a Railroad would involve this country in military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has hitherto been happily free-hereby record their emphatic protest against the sanction or execution of any such work.

Attention was called in this and other ways to the egregious nature of the proposal and its almost incredible folly, and a chorus of condemnation arose.

'Do your people understand?' said Count Münster, the German Ambassador here. 'Do your people understand? Do they not see that they might one day, however unwillingly, be drawn into some Continental complication, and that in the uncertain fortune of war England might for the time be on the losing side? While she remains an island she would in the end certainly right herself by means of her navy, but if by any chance she were defeated after such a tunnel were made, the first condition of peace exacted by a victorious enemy would be the surrender in perpetuity of the entrance to it, and the consequent loss of your independent existence.'

What would not Germany give for twenty miles of water between her and France!' said the Empress Frederick, then the Crown Princess, to the present writer.

The public opinion evoked was conclusive and a death-blow to the insane project, which was supposed to be shelved and forgotten, at any rate until England should have forgotten the immunities she derives from her island fortress.

But company-promoters and speculators, like the poor, are always with us and always ready to renew their attacks upon public credulity. It has been suggested that it might therefore be well to remind readers at the present time of the careful and exhaustive way in which the matter was considered in the last generation, and to reproduce the record of what passed in 1882 for easy and convenient reference. It is accordingly reprinted here, and forms a Supplement to this number.

Public opinion has altered so little since then that it is still faithfully reflected by this record. What changes in it have taken place tend to intensify the objections of common sense to the project which Baron d'Erlanger and his friends now again urge upon us. There is, for instance, a growing desire and determination to diminish the burden of taxation for military purposes so far as is compatible with national security; and the present Government especially acknowledges a 'mandate' to that effect. Yet at a time. when every effort is being made to limit our defensive forces, both naval and military, to a point which many consider too risky, these promoters have the assurance to ask for a serious and quite voluntary

increase in them. Nobody-not even the promoters themselves and their sympathisers-denies that elaborate and costly and permanent precautions (which might or might not be practically effective when the critical moment arrived) must be taken to close up or destroy, upon occasion, the hole which the promoters would bore through our hitherto inviolate frontier. To avoid public panics alone and their ruinous expenditures, such precautions would be indispensable. That admission is fatal to the argument that there is no risk in the scheme. And why should one iota of national risk be incurred for it?

To un-island England and join her soil to the soil of the Continent while Europe is seething with unrest and complexities and perplexities, and to do this at the invitation of private company-promoters for their own (problematical) profit, sounds like the plot of a comic opera. Fortunately, it will no more commend itself to British common sense than it did twenty-five years ago.

Victor Hugo once said to me in Paris, 'I shall not live to see, but you will live to see the United States of Europe'; to which my rejoinder was, 'Then I shall live to be a very old man ! '

When that day dawns England may possibly be willing to modify her entire reliance upon her Sea-Frontier and adopt conscription, but till then she will neither undermine it herself nor suffer it to be undermined by others.

JAMES KNOWLES (Editor).

THE REVIVED CHANNEL TUNNEL

PROJECT

II

THE advocates of the Channel Tunnel, it appears, complain that no statement has been put forward, by those who object to it, of the definite grounds of their protest or of the dangers which they see in its construction. That means, I take it, that they have not read those very definite statements which have been put forward; but as it is very easy to re-state the case I propose now to do so. Nearly a quarter of a century ago the reasons given were sufficiently definite to cause that strong expression of national feeling against the Tunnel which Sir James Knowles is now issuing as a supplement herewith. All that has happened, since that vigorous denunciation of the scheme was published, has tended to show that the danger is greater even than we then had reason to suppose. Two wars have taken place since the question last became urgent. One of them has shown the dangers of trusting to the perpetual vigilance of the defenders of a vital point; the other the impossibility of taking precautions in the moment of danger. When the Russo-Japanese war broke out the Russian fleet at Port Arthur was far less vital to the safety of Russia than our end of the Channel Tunnel must always be for us; yet, when Admiral Togo, on the night of the 8th to 9th of February, 1904, attacked the Russian fleet and reduced it to a condition of impotence which from that hour made it impossible for it to contest the command of the seas with Japan, so little did anyone in Port Arthur expect Japanese attack that the great bulk of the officers both of navy and army were the invited guests of one of the principal officers of the garrison, and were carousing gaily when the sounds from the harbour burst upon their ears. Even more significant was the history of our late Boer war. During all the time when Kruger and Steyn were preparing their armaments, it was, as is duly recorded in the official history, impossible for our Government to take those steps which were necessary to remove the local military weakness of our troops, on which the Boer leaders were counting to enable them to gain their ends, because, well as the facts were known to them, the nation did not know them, and every attempt to warn

the people at large of the coming danger tended to leave the impression that it was designed to bring on war. That always has been so throughout the whole course of our history. Always, long before our present Constitution came into being, our rulers have felt it necessary to have the whole nation behind them before they ventured upon war, and have dreaded lest they should be supposed to be the guilty parties who bring it on. It is old chroniclers who, on that account, always speak of England as the unready.'

That

Hitherto our dominant fleets have given us time for preparation, at least for home defence. When once the Channel Tunnel is made, the safety of England will depend, not upon anything that our fleets can do, but upon the unceasing vigilance and adequate power of those who protect the English end of the Tunnel. is a strain which has never yet been put upon any English troops whatever. One can only therefore judge of the possibility of trusting to its being continuous throughout all time by the experiences of others. Now war has often begun by the sudden surprise of fortresses incalculably less important than this would be to us. Those who say that a thousand men firing down the Channel Tunnel with modern quick-firing rifles would be adequate to stop any numbers coming out of the narrow opening assume conditions which could not in fact prevail. If the thousand men were there, if they had an open space in front of them to fire down into the column emerging from the Tunnel, the statement would probably be true. But even if the thousand men were actually there at the right moment, the confusion of a great railway station, the movements to and fro of trains, would produce conditions very different from those that are required for the efficient employment of troops. Therefore in none of the schemes which have been put forward by any of those soldiers who have carefully considered the subject has any such proposal really been made. Sir Archibald Alison's Committee, which was appointed to devise the best schemes which could be arranged for the protection of the English end of the Tunnel, recommended a regular fortress as essential for safety. Now, in all the suggestions that are made by those who now advocate the scheme this idea of an independent fortress is dropped. Our safety is, according to them, to depend on the defences which now exist at Dover, the Western heights, and Dover Castle. These are not a fortress in the Continental sense of the term at all. A first-class fortress like Metz requires for its protection 30,000 men. Sir Archibald Alison modestly asked for 8,000 men. The present advocates ask for no increase to the garrison. Yet it is not on the safety of such a fortress as Metz that Germany depends for her security. She depends instead upon the fact that the whole of her virile population is trained to war, and that none escape the claims of the State except those unfortunate people who have some serious physical defect.