Sir Edward Hamley enlarges on this argument in an able
letter to Thursday's Times, which he would have delivered as a speech but for the appeal of the Government to shorten debate. To make the tunnel would be, he says, to increase the chances of a successful invasion, for if the English end of the tunnel could be seized by a surprise, troops could be poured through it in a continual stream which our Navy would have no chance of interrupting. What could be more foolish than deliberately to diminish one of the great securities of this country, and to increase tenfold the sensitiveness of our people and their proneness to expensive scares P Sir Wilfrid Lawson, who believes himself a friend of peace, of course spoke in favour of administering this stimulus to military expenditure and popular panic ; and even Mr. Courtney, the able Chairman of Committees, characterised Baron de Worms's speech as a mixture of fogeyism and bogeyism. The House, however, had the good sense to veto this very gratuitous proposal to attack one of the most substantial of our national securities against both real danger and that tendency to panic which is a secondary danger of a serious kind, by a majority of 46 (153 to 107).
