Vivid as these scenes of destruction were, they had little effect on the anti-tunnel forces. Already, in February, another attack on the tunnel scheme had appeared in the literary magazine _The Nineteenth Century_, signed by Lord Dunsany. The article, repeating the claim that the tunnel project was a menace to Britain's security, referred to the capacity of the Dover fortress system to defend itself against a modern invading fleet as "contemptible." Lord Dunsany wrote that he had gone down to Dover to examine the famous fortress and had found that with the exception of the two recently installed turret guns on the Admiralty Pier, the guns "generally speaking were of an obsolete pattern—popguns, in fact." And he asserted that when he had remarked on the relatively modern appearance of one of the larger guns in a particularly commanding position of the fortress, "I was told by an artilleryman that there were orders against firing it, as it would bring down the brickwork of the rampart." Soon after this, an anonymous article in the _Army and Navy Gazette_ declared that "The Island has been invaded again and again" and it reminded the _Gazette's_ readers that "The present constitution of the country depends on the last successful invasion by a Dutch Prince with Dutch troops, and the overthrow of the King, by an army largely composed of foreigners." The article took Lieutenant-General Sir John Adye severely to task for having found the tunnel a good security risk, and it even went so far afield in its criticism of him as to find fault with the General for what it called his "deliberate, vehement, and long-continued resistance to the introduction of the breech-loading system in our artillery that placed us at the fag-end of all the world, when we ought to have been first." Then, in March, 1882, _The Nineteenth Century_ carried an article against the tunnel by Professor Goldwin Smith, who wrote that the protection of the Channel, by exempting England from the necessity of keeping a large standing army, had preserved the country from military despotism and enabled her to move steadily in the path of political progress. The Channel, Professor Smith wrote, in the past had preserved England from the Armada and from the army of Napoleon I; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had preserved the Reformation; and in the eighteenth century it had preserved her from the spread of revolutionary fevers and from subjection to foreign tyranny. Now, he said, it was the barrier between Britain's industrial people and military conscription, and he went on, in an echo of Mr. Gladstone's earlier remarks in the _Edinburgh Review_, to declare of the Channel that "A convulsion of nature which should dry it up would be almost as fatal to England as one which should ruin the dykes would be to Holland."