has run his head against a lamp-post. The letter of the Duke of Wellington to Sir John Burgoyne appeared in 1847, when Louis Philippe was on the throne, and has been, says Mr. Cobden, "the text-book for panic-mongers ever since."[1] It is rather singular that the brotherly love-mongers, and not the panic-mongers, are now the advocates of increased armaments—for there cannot be a doubt that a Channel Tunnel will infallibly lead to enormously increased armaments.
It is not unreasonable to require from any man who has given an opinion in favour of a Channel Tunnel, some satisfactory evidence that the man has manifested a sure-footed prescience in other matters of such importance that they concern the life or death of a nation. Mr. Cobden appears to take for granted that the least sympton of distrust is unworthy of a civilized nation, such as England esteems herself to be; and that to borrow the language of a letter of Sir William Molesworth which Mr. Cobden reprints (p. 80), "the French are as civilized as ourselves—in some respects intellectually our superiors." Well, what of that? I suppose Napoleon Bonaparte was intellectually
- ↑ "1793 and 1853," p. 58.
