THE CESSION OF HELIGOLAND.

Bruce Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 2196, 26 August 1890, Page 1

THE CESSION OF HELIGOLAND.

Perhaps the. most valuable immediate result of the treaty is the efflorescence of a hearty friendship between Germany and our own country. The treaty has been hailed with immense delight in Berlin, chiefly, as it seems, because of our spontaneous cession of Heligoland. This little rock of the North Sea, set about with sandbanks, is of no manner of value to us. It is a table-land of rock, with an area of about three-quarters of a square mile, ascended from the beach by a wooden staircase. Its normal inhabitants are very few —numbering about two thousand all told — who live during the winter almost cut off from communication with the outer world, and sometimes hidden from sight by impenetrable mists. The area of the rock is gradually being diminished by the inroads of the sea, aud the main probability against its ultimate extinction is that it may be surrounded before many years are over by rising sandbanks, formed by the discharge of the Elbe and the Weser about fifty miles distant. Eor a few fleeting weeks in summer, Heligoland becomes gay. The people of Hamburg have discovered that it has a charming climate. Though the shoals surrounding it make it useless as an arsenal or for naval purposes — except, perhaps, as a protection to the mouth of the Elbe— it may be easily and cheaply approached by pleasure steamers of light draught. Thus Heligoland has its season, during which thousands of patriotic Germans visit its shores — just aa in the summer months the great towns of Lancashire empty themselves upon the Isle of Man. r "What should we think, I wonder, if the Isle of Man — or, to speak more near the mark — the Calf of Man, were a German possession — with a German Governor, and a German judge — over a people who speak no German, and never saw Germany, and about which the only other German thing visible was the German flag, flaunting over English and Scottish residents and visitors ? What our feelings might be under such circumstances are the feelings of thousands of Germans who annually visit Heligoland — where Great Britain is represented amid the Frisian fishermen and the German visitors by two solitary officials, a governor and a judge, with the Union Jack floating over their residences. The spontaneous surrender of the island to Germany has filled the German people with a delight which shows how truly the phlegmatic German is a sentimentalist at heart. — 'Dunfermline Press.'