IX.] ALTER ORBIS. 219 IX. ALTER ORBIS.* I AM not going to discuss the question of the Channel Tunnel. On the military aspect of the matter I could say nothing beyond a single hint. I would ask, with the lowliness of an ignorant civilian, whether, if there be any military danger, it is not a danger that cuts both ways. It is assumed that the tunnel will be threatening to England; if it be threatening at all, why should it not be just as threatening to France? It is certain that, from the earliest times onwards, English armies have been much oftener seen in France than French armies have been seen in England. Or rather, we should not speak of France and England. The question is one of lands and not of nations; it is a question that existed before England and France, as such, had come into being, and it would still exist if Englishmen and Frenchmen should cease to be, and if some other nations should hold the northern and southern sides of the 'streak of silver sea.' The question is purely geographical, and the invasions of Cæsar and William have as much to do with the matter as the invasions the other way of Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth. Indeed our own presence in our own island is one part of the case. There is no fact in history more important than the very obvious fact that those from whom part of Britain took the name of England came into Britain by sea, while those from whom part of Gaul took the name of France came into Gaul by land. If it be said that we came in by the German Ocean and not by the Channel, it is easy to answer that the only real question is that of the insular position of Britain on all sides. And it is no less easy to answer that two of the Teutonic settlements in Britain, one of them the settlement which in the end grew into England, were actually made by way of the Channel. The plain facts are that not a few invaders have in various ages crossed both from the mainland to Britain and from Britain to the mainland, and that, since the nations of Europe made any approach to their present shape, the number of invaders who have crossed from Britain to the mainland is far greater than the number of invaders who have crossed from the mainland to Britain. The general danger seems equal on both sides; whether the tunnel, as a tunnel, implies any special danger to one side which it does not imply to the other side is a point on which I have no right to say a word. Buonaparte could not get from Boulogne to England; it may be that, if there had been a tunnel at that point, he would have come across. Henry the Eighth did get from England to Boulogne, but he got there only by going round by way of Edward the Fifth's conquest of Calais. Had there been a tunnel at that point, he might perhaps have been able to go straight across. I cannot decide such questions. I must confess that I do not love the notion of the tunnel. I rather share the sentiment which the Pythian priestess put forth to the men of Knidos in the opposite case: ἰσθμὸν δὲ μὴ πυργοῦτε μηδ ̓ ὀρύσσετε, I do not mean to take up a line which might condemn almost any great enterprise, any cutting through of necks of land, any tunnelling through the depths of mountains. But it does seem a strong thing to do ought that may even seem to wipe out the distinctive geographical and historical character of a land-to do ought that may seem to take away from it that which has made it and its people to be what they have ever been. I am certainly set against the IX.] INSULAR CHARACTER OF BRITAIN. 221 tunnel, not on military grounds, of which I am no judge, but from a fear that it may do something to lessen the insular character of Britain. I fear that it may do something to take from us, either in our own eyes or in the eyes of others, our ancient position as alter orbis, as a separate world of our own. We dwell in an island great enough to have always had interests of its own, thoughts of its owngreat enough to impress upon its people a distinct character directly as islanders, irrespective of any other features of character which belong to them through other causes, either of original descent or of later history. It is the insular character of Britain which has, beyond anything else, made the inhabitants of Britain what they are and the history of Britain what it has been. We are islanders: and I at least do not wish that we should become continentals. My only reason for being set against the tunnel is a fear-perhaps not altogether a fear, rather a mere vague kind of feeling— that it may do something, in sentiment at least, towards making us cease to be islanders, and become continentals. Up to this moment every man who has passed from the mainland to Britain or from Britain to the mainland has passed by one process, that of crossing the sea. Nothing has so strongly kept up the feeling of our island being, nothing has so deeply impressed it on our own minds and on the minds of others, as this simple fact that Britain can be reached only by sea. We might even go a step further: we might say that this insular character is not merely a characteristic of Britain and of its inhabitants of all its three races, but that it has become a characteristic of the English folk wherever they dwell. The more part of the still dependent colonists of Great Britain are geographically islanders; and even those who are geographically continentals are practically islanders. They cannot go to and fro, either towards the mother-country or towards any other European land, except by sea. And even Our mightier independent colonies, the newer and vaster England beyond the Ocean, are, in a certain sense, insular also. The people of the United States, even in their vast continent, with a greater stretch of continuous habitable mainland than any other people, are, for many purposes, practically islanders, and that even in a more emphatic sense than ourselves. They cannot match themselves with their fellows, they cannot visit either their mother-land or the land of any other nation of their own rank, without crossing, not a narrow strait, but the Ocean itself. And much of the distinctive character of the English folk in America, much of the distinctive character of the English folk in Britain, undoubtedly comes from this practically insular position of both. Some may perhaps wish the character of the English folk in either hemisphere to be other than it is, and doubtless we are not so perfect in either hemisphere but that we could stand some improvement. But any improvement which would make us cease to be islanders would be, if not improving us off the face of the earth, at least improving us out of ourselves, and making us into some other people. The American and the Australian aspects of the question we may pass by. No one, just yet at least, is likely to tunnel under the Ocean; the present question is simply one of tunnelling under the strait of Dover. To my mind. the question comes simply to this: Will the proposed tunnel do anything to lessen our insular character, or will it not? If it is likely so to do, let it be hindered for the sake of our present welfare and our future prospects. If there is no such danger, the tunnel has no more to be said against it than any other projected improvement in the way of travelling. Whether it is likely to bring about a change which I should so greatly dislike, I do not undertake to judge it is enough that the least suspicion of such a change is alarming. But I will not enter further into the question than to make one more remark, to expose a single fallacy. It is sometimes said that the tunnel is of itself simply of a piece with any other improved means of communication, with railways, steamers, tunnels and bridges in other places. IX.] CHANGE IMPLIED IN THE TUNNEL. 223 But there is a wide difference between the two cases. Railways and steamers, just like printing, simply enable us to do something better which we have always done somehow. The Channel tunnel is a proposal to make us do something which we have never done before. It has always been possible to cross the Channel by water. Successive ages have improved the means of crossing: a swift steamer is a better way of accomplishing the object than a coracle; but the difference between the two is a mere difference of detail. So it has always been possible to go by land from Spain to Russia. An express train is a better way of so doing than walking or riding; but the difference again is a mere difference of detail. But to go from Britain to the continent of Europe as the tunnel would take us-one hardly knows whether to call it going by land, but at any rate in some other way than crossing by water-is something altogether new. It is something altogether different from any mere improvement in the way of going by land or in the way of going by water. It is a change of a far more striking and emphatic kind, and must be argued for or against on quite other grounds. I will go no further into the argument whether the Channel tunnel is or is not likely practically to affect our insular character. But the fact that such a point can be raised may make it no bad time to give some little thought to that insular character of ourselves and our land, and to the way in which it has from the earliest recorded times affected both our own history and the history of our land before its history became ours. The greatest fact in the history of Britain is the geographical fact that Britain is an island. This is the ruling fact which has determined the nature of all other facts in British history. It is a greater fact than the Norman Conquest, than the conversion of Æthelberht, than the settlement of the Angles and Saxons. For it is the earlier fact which gave all these events their special character. Not one of those leading facts in our |