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38 at any other period of her history, solely dependent on her land forces for immunity from conquest.

Having cleared the ground so far as false history had cumbered it, I will now call evidence for and against the possibility of this country's suffering invasion in the future—a very near future, according to some people.

There has, perhaps, never been a time when such a possibility has not been present to the minds of men responsible for England's safety; but, up to a recent date, France, not Germany, was the quarter from which invasion was looked for, and in the course of the last hundred years there have been several well-developed French scares. After the last of these, to which the Fashoda incident gave rise, the British Government of the day appointed a Royal Commission, presided over by the Duke of Norfolk, to inquire into the grounds on which the belief