THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CHANNEL TUNNEL.
THEGovernment are very much in the wrong about the Bill authorising the construction of the Channel Tunnel. They have given notice that they will not oppose it, but will consider it an open question, and have given it in such a way as to leave the impression that they are, on the whole, favourable to the project. Mr. Gladstone certainly is ; and the majority of the Cabinet, including all the Radicals, usually follow his lead. The effect of this course of action is that the Government resigns the leadership, and has, in fact, no opinion upon a Bill which, of all the measures introduced during this century into Parliament, may have the most direct effect upon the position and future history of the country.Even if the i Bill is a good one, as its advocates pretend, t must enor- mously decrease the historic insularity of Great Britain, must facilitate and greatly develop non-commercial intercourse with the Continent, and must socially make of Great Britain an outlying annexe of France, constantly affected by French opinion, swarming with French visitors, and gradually feeling a disposition to respond to every French change. It is nonsense to say that a sea-passage can effect no moral separation, when we see the separation it has effected between Ireland and Great Britain, which, if joined together, would have be- come morally fused. If, on the other hand, the Bill is, as we contend, a bad Bill, it directly affects the security of the Kingdom, and, what is almost worse, the belief in that security. The "silver streak" which has been our pro- tection from invasion since Ciesar's time—for Prince Lewis was invited over by half the nobles of the realm—will be abolished, the Continent and England will be joined together, and the security of the island against in- vasion by a vastly superior force will depend upon two hypotheses,—that the Government of the day will have. the nerve to 'claw up the Tunnel, and that its English entrance could not be seized by a coup de main. Neither of these hypotheses can be relied upon as a cer- t Linty. Any Government would be most reluctant to destroy such a mass of property, to close the main line of communication with the Continent, and to ruin great bodies of voters ; and we might easily have a Government which would postpone its order until it was too late. We very much doubt, for example, whether Mr. Gladstone could bring himself to give the order, whether he would not consider the proposal an outrage on civilisation; whether he would not argue that the order would dissolve for ever the "bond of hearts" between us and the French; and whether he would not insist before the Tunnel was destroyed on a Commission of Inquiry to ascertain whether such destruction might not involve the drowning of some un- armed, or even friendly, persons,—railway navvies, for example, collected by the Company to resist the destruc- tion of their property. The British Government is, for certain purposes, one of the strongest, as well as the most competent in the world ; and we should be sorry to be a resident of Pekin, if an English order, approved by a Cabinet, had directed its destruction ; but when it is need- f al to take life under circumstances that the masses realise, it shrinks back, temporises, and usually gets into a position in which it has at last to kill twice as many people. As to the second hypothesis, that the English end of the Tunnel could never be seized, it is rejected by every expert, they all declaring, soldiers and sailors alike, that it could be seized and held for the necessary six hours by a certain sacrifice of soldiers' lives, about which no Continental General of repute would think even for five minutes. A man of that kind does not advertise a skirmish in which a Major has died as a serious affair, but reckons up the number of soldiers, say fifteen thousand, that will suffice for the blow, calculates how the half of them must fall in the six hours to be gained, and orders up three regiments more to the invading army, to fill up the gap caused by the "necessary sacrifice." Napoleon would have thrown away a corps d'armee on the mere chance of such a coup, and the Emperor Nicholas actually proposed a similar one against Constantinople, and was only dissuaded by evidence that his gigantic forlorn hope would be left in air,—just the contingency which the existence of the Tunnel would prevent. The idea that we should have formal warning is opposed to all the facts of history, as Colonel F. Maurice demonstrated two or three years ago ; and the idea, even more prevalent, that the French would never care to attack us, is based on ignorance of the first fact of the situation. They would attack us to-morrow, even if Egypt were the only stake, if they could fight by land, which is precisely what Sir E. Watkin's project will enable them to do. They do not care for a war which, under existing conditions, must be maritime, and could therefore neither add to the glory of their Army, nor secure that for which the nation longs,—the restoration of its prestige by victory in a pitched battle of the first class. Even, however, if we grant that the promoters are right, the project must have the most evil effects, for it will promote continual panic, a continual interest in all Continental military changes, and continual demands for more force to make the island safe against a shock which, if it ever occurred, would produce as its first consequence universal bankruptcy. Even business men hardly realise how completely credit is the foundation of English business, or what would be the ruinous effect of a week's panic as to the possibility of invasion,—a panic, we mean, with the reasonable foundation which the junction of England to the Continent would appear to lay. Many such panics would bring us the Conscription as the only continuous and perfect defence, and with it a change in all our institutions and modes of thought for which the Gladstonians, we are certain, do not long. Yet they permit the Government of their choice to leave a question like this an open one, and to signify that its chief con- siders the abolition of the "first line of defence" a matter of secondary importance which does not concern the Administration, and upon which everybody is at liberty to vote as he likes. That seems to us an abrogation of the leadership which it is the first virtue of responsible govern- ment to maintain.
We confess that the mental attitude of the average Gladstonian towards this and many other questions of the same kind is to us something of a perplexity. We do not believe in the least in the accusation of want of patriotism, so often brought against them by journalists who take no trouble, or have not the time, to perceive more than one side to any argument. Mr. Gladstone has never shrunk from fighting, if necessary—he thought the conquest of the Transvaal needless—and would probably oppose, to any foreign threat whatever, as determined a front as any Englishman could desire. His followers, we believe, are entirely of his mind, would fight without hesitation if they saw occasion, and are by no means as a body so scrupulous about the expansion of the Empire as is occasionally alleged. As far as we see, the Empire goes on growing in responsibilities as well as area, whoever may happen to be in power. There is, nevertheless, a certain indifference to the position of the nation in the world, a certain care- lessness about preparation, and a certain credulity about the attitude of foreign nations, among the followers of the Government, which it is not altogether easy to account for. It is due, in part, no doubt, to the ignorance of the class which usually elects Gladstonians, and which, outside Scotland, is inattentive to foreign questions, and indisposed to believe that the maintenance of the Empire in any great degree affects its interests. Representatives are always most moved by that which moves their con- stituents, and weighed down as they are with subjects to which they must attend, are almost perforce inclined to pass by those on which they are never prodded. In part, also, the indifference is due to the great influence among the Gladstonians of men wholly devoted to internal affairs, who believe at heart that nothing is important except social change, and who would cry "Perish India," or Britain, too, for that matter, rather than do anything which seemed to delay the realisation of their own ideals. And part is due, we feel certain, to a natural and probably useful form of party feeling. A historic accident has made the Tories the chief defenders of high-handed policy, of war, of military preparation, and of the expansion of the Empire, and their opponents naturally become critics of those things, and see the other side of them, which always exists and is sometimes neglected, a little too clearly. They are apt to put the cid bono question, which, in the sense they use it, is not always answerable. We shall not, for instance, get "value" out of Uganda, though our right there is, in our judgment, one which it would be almost infamous to abandon. Still, there is something more which is not quite explained by any of these three causes, and we incline to attribute it very much to the disposition of successive leaders. When Fox is the Liberal chief, his party sympathises with France, and in part with French aggression ; when Palmerston is reigning, the same men exult that he maintains the doctrine summed up in the words, olds Romanus sum. Lord John Russell, who would have fought the whole world if needful, was the idol of the Nonconformists; but now they worship Mr. Glad- stone, who, though quite willing to maintain old policies— or he could not work with Lord Rosebery—is nearly indif- ferent to foreign affairs, has never given his mind to military arrangements, and though not unwilling to let the Empire expand, is sometimes forgetful of the truth that war once begun, it is necessary to the national spirit, which is the foundation of Empires, that it should ter- minate in victory. It is an unfortunate peculiarity of temperament in a Dictator; and we trust that many Gladstonians will take advantage of the division on the subject in the Cabinet, so to swell the majority against Sir Edward Watkin, that he shall perceive his evil project to be irretrievably lost, at least, for one more Parliament. It is only when the country is overbusy that he will obtain so much as a hearing ; and England will hardly talk about Ireland to the Day of Judgment.
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