l the
planets related to us in the Solar System too hot to hold us, as well.
He has determined wantonly to attack a sphere with which we have always
maintained the most cordial relations, to invade its territories, ravage
its villages, and introduce the atrocious benefits of Maxim guns and
Gladstone claret to the Selenites.'

'The honourable member observed a moment ago,' said the Prime Minister
ironically, 'that there were no Selenites.'

'So I did,' returned the Opposition member unabashed. 'I am not ashamed
of that. If the Moon has no inhabitants, you can have no commercial
relations with the Moon; if it has, you can only demoralise an
unsophisticated population. But I refuse to be held responsible for
the opinions I expressed two minutes ago. I am a true Briton, and I
absolutely decline to limit myself to a single contradiction, or to a
dozen, in the course of a quarter of an hour's harangue.'

'We can quite believe _that_!' said the Home Secretary blandly. 'But
till my honourable friend undertakes the management of affairs--before
which may heaven remove me! ("Hear, hear!" from the honourable
friend)--it is the business of competent statesmen to preserve relations
friendly yet firm with foreign Powers terrestrial and celestial, and
we shall do it, sir, if we have to annex the Pleiades (cheers).
To illustrate by a single case the urgency of an action which the
honourable member, in his own choice and happy phraseology, stigmatised
as a wild-goose chase. If a Power which I will not specify is allowed
to occupy that interesting orb which it is our hope to link closely with
our own destinies in national union--_what of the tides_? (Cheers.)
Sir, it has long been our proud boast that Britannia rules the waves.
How much longer, I ask you, would she continue to rule them, if once the
sway with which the studies of our childhood have made us all familiar
passed into the hands of alien and perhaps hostile authorities?
(Prolonged cheers.) Can we doubt that unfriendly arbitration would
eventually turn away all the tides from our hitherto favoured island,
and would divert the current of the Gulf Stream to Powers with whom our
relations are strained, while punctually supplying us with icebergs
and a temperature below zero from the Arctic Zone? Once hemmed in (or
surrounded) by icebergs, what becomes of your carrying trade? Can we
doubt that the trade-winds, too, would be mere playthings in the hands
of a lunar colonial Gover