It would be hard to conceive of anything to the English mind less conceivable than such a desertion. Its mere mention raised the most violent denunciation and poured a torrent of abuse upon the unfortunate advisors. The thought of it sapped the very foundations of the English sense of existence. It seemed the vertigo of madness. It deranged the most obvious assertions of common sense. It was an impeachment of the English reality. To think of it was a betrayal of trust, a breach of faith, a succinct defiance of the Almighty, a blasphemous rejection of the lessons of history, a timorous surrender to the threats of the weather. But later, when the Scottish population began to throw its inundating tides of people into England, and the Englishman read at his breakfast table of the floes of ice in the Clyde, and the buried Grampians, the insurmountable drifts about Stirling, and the incipient neve masses on Scuir-na-Gillean, in Skye, the reluctant embarkation of the merchants of Aberdeen, the closing of its great University, the shrinkage of business in Glasgow; when they realized that in truth the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had become united by a broad gateway through which the Gulf Stream, which erstwhile transported the heat of the equator to Europe, now emptied its torrid waters, bathing the western coasts of North America as far north as Alaska, and bringing to that Arctic country almost the same blessing of fructifying warmth with which it had before endowed England; when still further they began to hear, and to realize, by private letters, the affectionate summons and offers of the colonies, the overwhelming loyalty of the brothers across the sea, their frenzied eagerness to place their lands almost gratuitously in the hands of the mother people, and assume towards them the role of honored beneficiaries, then a strange, unwonted wondering began, as to whether it might not be best to look into the matter. And then intelligence aroused, with continued inspection, the impression grew, that indeed the prospects were alarming. The English mind, once startled in a certain direction, soon takes on an impetus proportionate to the inertia of its first movements, and therefore by a natural law of psychology and mechanics gains in accelerated velocity with each succeeding moment. So it was now. The industry of the scientific propaganda, its inventive persistency, was followed by the conversion of the large financial and commercial interests, and then a panic seized the great masses of the nation. Parliament took it up, the papers bulged and teemed with information, discussion, advice, and reports. A determining influence with the large trading classes was the decline, in some instances the positive disappearance of business, while to others not chained in insular possessions, a new world of adventure and chance seemed not altogether undesirable.