Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/196

 especially the southern and south-eastern, were the evidences that the sea, in past times, had been unremittingly busy, and almost without let or hindrance, in swallowing up the land. Even up to, and during, the nineteenth century, we took these repeated losses of national territory with remarkable composure. A very different spirit had come over us in the twentieth century; that spirit, namely, which sent us reclaiming and embanking, in order to get back all that we could of those terrible ocean robberies of the past. Precautions were everywhere prescribed by authority, so that no such national calamity and national scandal as a landslip into the sea should now, by any possibility, occur.

Nevertheless, the atrocious incident in question did once more happen, and at a time also that was even far into the twentieth century. When the people awoke one morning to learn that, during the night, a score of acres of our southern coast had suddenly subsided and slipped into the Channel waves, grief and regret first, and then high indignation, filled every mind. The Government of the day felt as much concerned as though a great political crisis had come upon them, a crisis which might possibly end in turning them out of office. All the proprietors of the coast had long ago been bound, under heavy penalties, to report at once upon the slightest symptoms of landslipping, and such an event had thus become as rare as it was unwelcome. Happily, on this occasion, for all the reputations that were in jeopardy, some hidden natural causes were proved to have been at their undermining work, and thus proprietor and Government were alike delivered from some serious consequences.