Page:The Channel Tunnel, Ought the Democracy to Oppose Or Support It?.djvu/22

 counsellor, warning his countrymen against real dangers. He has recourse to poetry, pathos, general denunciation of treaties as valueless, and to tricks of curiously irrelevant appeal to national passion and national fear.

Every objection stated by Lord Wolseley was seriously weighed by Lord Lansdowne and those who concurred in the minority report.

"With regard to the possibility of seizing the English end of the tunnel by means of a small force landed in its neighborhood," Lord Lansdowne and those concurring with him report: "we have endeavored to ascertain precisely the conditions, of which the presence would be indispensable if such an attempt were to have any chance of success. Those conditions would, we understand, be the following:

"(1.) It would be necessary that the invading force should be despatched with absolute secrecy.

"(2.) That it should cross the Channel unobserved and unmolested by our fleet.

"(3.) That the state of the weather should offer no difficulties to the disembarcation.

"(4.) That its landing should be effected without hindrance.

"(5.) That it should advance without molestation from the point at which it might be landed to the works by which the exit of the tunnel would be protected.

"(6.) That it should find the garrison in a state of absolute unpreparedness.

"(7.) That it should succeed in carrying by a simultaneous rush the whole of the various works surrounding the exit of the tunnel.

"(8.) That this capture should be effected so rapidly as