The Estranging Sea
"God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain whole within itself."
SO speaks "the Tory member's elder son," in "The Princess":—
"... God bless the narrow seas!
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad ";
and the transatlantic reader, pausing to digest this conservative sentiment, wonders what difference a thousand leagues would make. If the little strip of roughened water which divides Dover from Calais were twice the ocean's breadth, could the division be any wider and deeper than it is?
We Americans cross from continent to continent, and are merged blissfully into the Old-World life. Inured from infancy to contrasts, we seldom resent the unfamiliar. Our attitude towards it is, for the most part, frankly receptive, and full of
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