'I should like to know,' said a member, rising below the gangway, 'whether the Government has given its attention to one point, namely, that as where there is no atmosphere there can be no inhabitants, where there can be no inhabitants there can be no representatives of rival terrestrial Powers. Unless the forces of a certain Power are capable of living without air, I fail to see that we have anything to apprehend from their occupation of the Moon. Russians, for instance, are not personally dear to me; and I should say that the more of them introduce civilisation to that extinct and uninhabitable sphere the better; but I utterly decline to go there myself, or to vote for sending even our convicts there, much less our able-bodied unemployed. I should like this little difficulty explained, for I confess that, to an unstatesmanlike mind, this debate seems to be verging on nonsense.' 'I had not thought it necessary, at this early stage of the debate,' observed the Prime Minister plaintively, 'to remind the House that no such difficulty as that present to the mind of the honourable member really exists. Has my honourable friend below the gangway never heard of a mental or a moral atmosphere? Is it not one which inevitably surrounds us, in the incandescent Soudan or in the chill abode of departed Selenites? What he regards as an insuperable drawback only furnishes me with another reason for urging the Bill upon you. Would it not be a disgrace to the British flag, ever the friend of civilisation and of virtue, to allow a perverted moral atmosphere to be introduced into an orb which has done so much for us in the way of tidal action, of artistic enjoyment, and, I will say, of amatory sentiment—(cheers)—as our satellite? Now what kind of moral atmosphere, I would ask, surrounds the average Russian? Of a mental atmosphere I will not speak—suffice it to say that that also is immeasurably inferior; but is it fitting for a nation like ours, in the van of progress, to suffer a moral atmosphere degraded, pernicious, and suffocating to circulate in regions to which we could furnish one so infinitely more salubrious?' (Prolonged Ministerial cheers.) CHAPTER XII. THE DELUGE. 'The drivelling of politicians!' Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. It is said that the unexpected always happens, and therefore one may deplore without surprise the fact that schemes set on foot by a charitable government to relieve the necessities of their starving fellow-countrymen should frequently have a diametrically opposite effect. Into the Ministerial cheers that followed the Premier's last statement broke a sound outside the House, a sound as of much wailing, the howling of innumerable newsboys, the cries of 'Woe, woe!' the dirge of an empire _qui s'en va_! With those now familiar noises was mingled, but at a greater distance, a strain of martial music.