The Spectator

From ‘Pages of War’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: With its darkened lights and sparse traffic, its khaki-dotted clubs and restaurants working at half-pressure, its transformed shop-windows, where everything is "for the front," London was yet never so absolutely, so intimately itself. All the distilled essence of the Empire is concentrated here under these foggy skies swept by wheeling searchlights. As though in the full pageant of mid-season, the cream of the shires and bigwigs from the unfamiliar counties pass and repass along pavements where no alien jostles them off the kerb, magnetized every one of them from their homes by haunting, mute anxiety to keep their finger on the pulse of the world's supreme news-centre.

From a letter to the Editor, ‘The Channel Tunnel’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: [To the Editor of The “Spectator’] SIR,—Many of us must be wondering what the promoters of the Channel Tunnel enterprise think about the matter now. To those of us who are of the "Island" school it has always appeared that there were three main objections to the scheme —first, the risk of panic and of the evils that arise from panic; secondly, the real danger involved; and thirdly, the fact that in creating a tunnel we should be giving a hostage to fortune. A mere layman cannot set forth adequately the risks that the existence of a tunnel might have involved in the present war; but his guesses may not be altogether devoid of suggestiveness.