'1.11.W LATEST ARCTIC EXPEDITION.
THE commanders of the Arctic ships have settled clearly and unmistakably the conditions on which alone those who con- trol the next Expedition can hope to succeed in reaching the North Pole by the route now tried. That is a most important service rendered both to science and the State, and we sincerely trust that if it were for this alone, both officers will be decorated and promoted as rapidly as the interests of the Service will allow. They have failed, it is true, but they have done the best they could to succeed, and in doing it they and their comrades equally have exhibited qualities which make stay-at- home Englishmen who could not rival them even if they had the opportunity flush with pleasure to think that such. men are their countrymen. It has long been remarked that Arctic voyaging brings out the higher qualities of all engaged as no other dangerous service seems to do, and the narratives of the adventures of the ' Alert ' and the Discovery' help to show that the moral greatness so often manifested by Arctic voyagers is not developed accidentally. No doubt the qualities chiefly wanted are those which are most usually found in our countrymen and in good sailors of all nations, but to find them in such abundance and in such degree is never- theless a great pleasure, as well as a just source of national pride. The public thoroughly recognises, we believe, the courage and the fortitude displayed by the explorers, but we doubt if even yet it realises the full weight of the conditions under which those qualities are displayed in an Arctic voyage. To make one of a forlorn-hope is a brave deed, but to make one in a forlorn-hope which must endure all for eighteen months, and must show its highest resolution, its most im- plicit obedience when partially blind, is a far grander effort. It is that night of 142 days, that continuous darkness as of a world without a sun, that long-protracted sense of gloom, that inability to know anything for certain, which to us con- stitutes the special aggravating horror of all Arctic endurance. The sailors are called upon not only to be brave, but to be brave in the dark ; not only to be cheerful, but to be cheerful without heat ; not only to face a danger, but to face a danger which continues, which is as pressing when you are ill as when you are in highest vigour, which, sleeping or waking, full- fed or starving, is always there. No nerve, they say, can stand the dread of assassination,—evea Cromwell broke down under it ; but the dread must be very like, in its con- tinuousness and implacability, the horror of an Arctic night, under which the crews of the Expedition no more lost their cheerfulness than their discipline. Severe work for months without relaxation often cows men, but the explorers from the ' Alert ' worked like slaves—in one instance, for seventy-two days—at unaccustomed work, in cold that would kill unacclizna- tised men, and under perpetual liability to scurvy, the most heart-breaking of diseases, which struck other parties employed in surveying the coast severely ; "owing to their inability to procure any fresh game, as most former expeditions had done, an- attack of scurvy broke out in each of the extended sledge- parties when at their farthest distance from any help. The return journeys were, therefore, a prolonged struggle home- wards of gradually weakening men, the available force to pull the sledge constantly decreasing, and the weight to be dragged as steadily increasing, as one after another the invalids were stricken down and had to be carried by their weakened com- rades." There is sustained heroism in an exploit of that kind which it is difficult fully to appreciate, from the mere difficulty of realising fully the horror involved in some of the conditions. We find it easier to admire Lieutenant Parr setting out for a . lonely walk of thirty-five miles, guided over the soft snow and the heavy broken-up ice by the fresh track of a roaming wolf, and so bringing succour to his disease-stricken comrades ; or Mr. Egerton and Lieutenant Rawson, nursing Petersen, the interpreter, at the hazard of their own lives, while on their journey from the ' Alert ' to the 'Discovery,' with the temperature 40° below zero. Petersen, who had ac- companied them with the dog-sledge, fell ill, and "at the utmost risks and with a noble disregard of themselves, they suc- ceeded in retaining heat in the poor fellow's body by alter- nately lying one at a time alongside of him, while the other by exercise was recovering his warmth, and thus managed to bring him alive to the ship ; but both feet were very badly frost-bitten, and he ultimately sank from exhaustion two months afterwards." All Englishmen, we hope, acknowledge conduct like that, yet it is scarcely nobler than that of Captain Nares, who lived thirty-six days in the " crow's-nest " in that horrible climate while his ship was in difficulties in the ice, till he was utterly exhausted ; and not nobler than that of the men who for days and weeks drew the sledges and their sick comrades, under cold which sometimes froze the joints, and amid scenes which to many natures would have suggested no feelin but despair. There is something in the continuity of the effort made in these regions, in the protraction of the endurance, in the day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month heroism displayed till heroism has become a nature, winch is to us inexpressibly admirable, and all the more so n because for reeh of the time the hope of a brilliant success, which might live for ever in the mouths of men, must have faded out of the minds of all concerned. The discovery of the Pole might have repaid all for any- thing, but from the spring of this year that hope must have form of enterprise must now at last be abandoned. It will We all know that in the battles which concern Trade, the not, we venture to predict, be abandoned. On the contrary, general community, which in the first instance suffers the most Captain Nares and his comrades have contributed so much to from any false mode of proceeding, is apt to understand little the clearing-up of the subject, that we believe that within about the injury it is about to suffer, and to do less to pre- five years the determination not to be beaten will be re- vent it. While the landed interest or the merchants clamour for vived among the Arctic experts, and that a new expedition, protection, the people who will have to pay for it out of their with new precautions, will be sent out, either by the State own pockets look on, and are hardly aware that it is they who or by private enterprise. What is proved is that it is pos- are in the first instance concerned to resist the injury which it sible, even by this route, to get a ship within 450 miles is proposed to inflict on them. The main reason why we got of the Pole, and that from thence a journey as long as rid of Protection comparatively so easily, was that the leaders from London to Edinburgh must be made in extreme of the great Trade Interests in England, instead of clamouring cold—say, 50 below zero—over immovable ice, packed into for more protection for themselves, had the acuteness to per- hummocks so high that sledges cannot move, and that a way ceive that it was their cue to make war on the protection which must be cut with the pickaxe at the rate of a mile and a the landlords and the farmers had obtained. Those great quarter a day. The work, too, must be done within four and coherent interests, which are so powerful to confuse months of starting, or for want of light and heat it can never the intelligence of the people when they begin to ask for be done at all. Those are terrible conditions for men to face, special privileges, in our case took up the opposite and conditions such as make an order to attempt the .feat absurd sound policy of challenging the special favours which, and immoral ; but granted volunteers, the conditions are not, as it was supposed, had been conferred upon the agri- as they might have been, absolutely impossible. There is no cultural interest. But in the younger settlements of English wall of fog miles thick, such as seems to protect part of the origin, in the United States and in Canada and in Australia, Antarctic region from human observation. There is no sea the opposite course was unfortunately taken. The great mann- within a circle of ice just broad enough to prohibit the trans- factoring interests, instead of taking care to prevent the grant of port of the necessary boats. There is only a march of excessive special privileges to agriculture, have clamoured for and obtained difficulty under extreme cold, and in a country which produces the grant of special privileges to their own class, and what absolutely nothing to eat, as little as if it were floored with has been the result ? They have always injured themselves, marble, or were covered with the Sahara sand. The passage though without knowing it, even more than they have injured of those 400 miles cannot be an impossibility, for seventy of the rest of the community. Victoria, which adopted pro- them were, by terrible exertions, but with no loss of life, sue- tection for its manufactures, has, relatively to its population, cessf ally passed. Now that the difficulty is understood and is fewer successful manufactures than New South Wales, which limited in men's minds, that there is no further hope of an was in its general policy free-trading. Again, the manufacturers open Polar Sea, and no expectation of any supplies, however of the United States have succeeded to admiration in injuring small, from the spot itself, science will furnish future expedi- themselves and Mr. Lefevre quotes the great American econo- tions with undreamt-of resources—portable light and heat, for mist and financier, Mr. David Wells, to the effect that "one instance, from the newly-discovered mines at Disco ; secure has only to pick out the separate industries which have been preventives against scurvy ; methods of clearing a way more especially protected to find out those which are more especially expeditious than the pickaxe ; and traction-agents for traversing unprofitable and dependent." Again, going to other than the way when cleared indefinitely more powerful than Arctic Anglo-Saxon countries, Mr. Lefevre shows how uniformly the dogs. With electric lights, and sufficient supplies of dynamite, protective system has injured the State adopting it, instead of and a traction-engine for the smoothed road, the traversing of the State against whose interests it appears to operate. Our trade the dreary ice-plain, broad as it is, and hummocky as it may with the countries of liberal tariffs, Norway and Sweden, Den- be, must be within the limits of human energy and resource. mark and Belgium has increased 300 per cent., and our im- Whether the object is worth all that trouble is a question port and export trades with them have increased at the same which different minds will answer in different ways, but which rate, in the same period in which our trade with the countries - the aggregate English mind will answer sooner or later, when of more protective tariffs has increased only 100 per cent., it has recovered from the fit of despondency which follows the and our import trade much more than our export trade. return of every Arctic Expedition, by absolutely refusing to be Not only have the special interests which have secured beat, a protective tariff almost uniformly begun to languish in eon- It is waste of money very likely, but if the taxpayers agree sequence, but the country which has adopted a protective tariff that they had rather waste their money than that England has found its trade languish, or at least fail to grow, in exact should recede from a maritime enterprise to which her credit is proportion to the protective character of its tariff. pledged, or in which her obstinacy is engaged, the waste of But it is not only in relation to protective tariffs that Mr. money need not to be discussed. It is not the twentieth of a Lefevre's address illustrates the universality of the law of penny in the income-tax, after all. There will be sacrifice of economic retribution. He points out very powerfully how the human life? Some, no doubt ; but an Expedition can go out enormous fine unwisely and unrighteously exacted by Germany and return, as Captain Nares has shown, with less loss than from France has had the unexpected effect of stimulating the there will be in London next week from reckless driving, or in thrift of France and relaxing tha thrift of Germany, till, as he playgrounds this winter from the use of a clangorous coda for says, it haa b000me a standing joke in Germany to suggest the game of football. The argument from waste of life would that at the next capitulation of Paris, Germany should terminate only be final, if conscripts were ordered on Arctic expeditions. the war on the understanding that she should pay the But there is no object ? Well, then, it is no object that 1200,000,000 to France, in order that Germany may obtain the England should not, after her magnificent efforts and in the prosperity, and France suffer the prejudice of that transaction. face of the whole world, publicly acknowledge herself defeated Mr. Lefevre explains the rationale of the paradox very clearly. by the dangers and difficulties of a march one-fifth of which "Is not the explanation," he said, "to be found hi this,—that
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