THE CHANNEL TUNNEL SCHEME.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2525, 15 September 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE CHANNEL TUNNEL SCHEME.

Tub debate on the Channel Tunnel yesterday was as brilliant and entertaining as the division was decisive. Without expressing any opinion one way or the other for or against the tunnel, or without in any way raising the question whether or not the making the tunnel would give England a land frontier, we may be permitted to remark that Mr Gladstone outdid himself iu the passage in which he discussed, with characteristic detachment of mind, the supeiiority of a land frontier to that supplied by the silver streak- Upon the House of Commons and upon Englishmen generally the effect of such a philosophic dissertation from one who had been a Prime Minister of Great Britaiu, and who will be Prime Minister again, can only be compared to that which would be produced on a devout congregation in St. Paul's if Canon Liddon one Sunday afternoon were suddenly to inform his hearers that whereas reference had been to the belief that there was no God, as if that were an unmixed evil, the advantages of the non-existence of a deity were enormous compared with the disadvantages and dangers of His existence. Besides, consider the ordinary normal and habitual condition of sin in which the majority of men spend their lives, and do not forget the enormous advantage of a state of things which would relieve the human race from the dread looking forward to of judgment to come. The sensation which such a dispassionate and philosophic disquisition would have upon the congregation in St. Paul's would correspond pretty closely to the feeling of dismay excited in the mind of his stoutest supporters by Mr Gladstone's sudden discovery of the enormous advantages of a land frontier.