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All at once, it seems, the entire British press was in an uproar of criticism against the Channel tunnel and its unfortunate promoters. TheSunday Timespretty well expressed a common reaction of newspapers and periodicals to the latest developments when it said, in an editorial, "We confess to experiencing a feeling of relief on hearing of the interdiction of [Sir Edward Watkin's] progress" in his "working day and night to put an end to that insular position which has in past times more than once proved our sheet anchor of safety. We sincerely hope that Sir E. Watkin's project will shortly receive its finalcoup de grâce. No doubt," it added presciently, "he will not yield without a resolute struggle."

Some hard things were said in the press about the great tunnel promoter. He was accused in various publications of "adroit and unscrupulous lobbying" and of dispensing "profuse hospitality ... persistent and continuous" in pursuit of his scheme. In the May issue ofThe Nineteenth Century, which contained a further number of attacks on the tunnel, Lord Bury reported bitterly on the softening effect that Sir Edward Watkin's public-relations technique had had on afriend of his. Asked if he had signed the great petition against the tunnel, the friend was said to have replied, "No, I have not; I am strongly against the construction of the Tunnel, and I told Watkin so. But he gave a party of us, the other day, an excellent luncheon, and was very civil in showing us everything; so I should not like to do an unhandsome thing to him by signing the protest."

An editorialist in a periodical calledAll the Year Round, which formerly had been put out by Charles Dickens, wrote of the "extraordinary vigor" with which Sir Edward was pushing his tunnel. The editorialist dwelt in satirical fashion on the manner in which prominent persons were "perpetually being whisked down to Dover by special trains, conducted into vaults in the chalk, made amiable with lunch and sparkling wines, and whisked back in return specials to dilate to their friends (and, incidentally, to the public) on the peculiar charm of Pommery and Greno consumed in a chamber excavated far under the sea." The writer found Sir Garnet Wolseley's argument, that the English end of the tunnel could be seized, "on reflection to be perfectly feasible." He asked, "Can anyone suppose that if such a government as that which was formed by the Communists were by any chance ... to rule France, the danger that the temptation to make such a grand coup as the conquest and plunder of England would be too much for them would not be a very real and very present one?" And he wound up by warning "that French troops might checkmate our fleet by simply walking underneath it, and ... take a revenge for Waterloo, the remote possibility of which must make every Englishman shudder."

The probable future effects of the Channel tunnel upon the nervous systems of Englishmen were the subject of intense speculation in most of the press, as a matter of fact. Almost without exception, the prognosis of this hypotheticalnervous condition was grave. If, nowadays, the capacity to maintain extraordinary spiritual fortitude under conditions of national emergency has come to be regarded almost as a basic characteristic of the British people, it is a characteristic that the Victorian British press seemed not to be aware of. Almost unanimously, the press warned that part of the price of constructing a tunnel would be the occurrence of wild periodic alarms among the population. "Perpetual panics and increased military expenditure are the natural result of such a change as that which will convert us from an island into a peninsula," an editorial inJohn Bulldeclared. The LondonDaily Newsdemanded to know whether "anyone who is in the least acquainted with English character and history" could deny the country's susceptibility to periodic panics. TheDaily Newsdwelt apprehensively on the inevitable result of panics arising out of the construction of a Channel tunnel:

We should be constantly beginning expensive and elaborate schemes for strengthening the defences according to the fashionable idea of the day.... They would be about half carried out by the time the next panic occurred, and then they would be obsolete.... Now it would be elaborate fortifications at Dover itself; now a great chain of forts to hem it in from inland; now the old scheme of the fortification of London; now the establishment of forts out at sea over the tunnel.... Is it worth while to run the chance...?

The most diverse arguments were advanced in the press against the construction of the tunnel. In the May issue ofThe Nineteenth Century, Major-General Sir E. Hamley raised the question of whether the French, invading Britainby train through the tunnel, might not seize some distinguished English people and carry the captives along on the engine as hostages, so that however thoroughly the officer in charge of the defensive apparatus at the English end were alerted to their presence, "still he might well be expected to pause if suddenly certified that he would be destroying, along with the enemy in the Tunnel, some highly important Englishmen." Another writer, referring to the responsibility and possibly also to the character of the officer in charge of the tunnel defenses, observed thoughtfully that "the commandant of Dover would carry the key of England in his pocket." Still another commentator wondered if responsibility for making a decision to blow up the tunnel might not be too much even for an English Prime Minister:

The Premier might think himself justified in destroying twenty millions of property ... but also, he might not. He might be an undecided man, or a man expecting defeat by the Opposition, or a man paralyzed by the knowledge that the tunnel was full of innocent people whom his order would condemn to instant death, in a form which is at once most painful and most appalling to the imagination. They would all be drowned in darkness. The responsibility would be overwhelming for an individual, and a Cabinet, if dispersed, takes hours to bring together.

In his article inThe Nineteenth CenturyLord Bury, going under the assumption that a Prime Minister in a period of gravest national emergency would indeed be able to haul his Cabinet colleagues and military advisers together in reasonable time to consider having the tunnel blown up, asked his readers to conjure up the painful scene at Downing Street:

Imagine him for a moment sitting in consultation. His military advisers tell him that the decisive moment has come. "I think, gentlemen," says the minister, turning to his colleagues, "that we are all agreed—the Tunnel must be immediately destroyed. Fire the mine!" "There is one other point," says the officer, "on which I request instructions—at what time am I to execute the order?" "At once, sir; telegraph at once, and in five minutes the blasting charge can be fired." "But," persists the officer, "trains laden with non-combatants are at this moment in the Tunnel. They enter continuously at twenty minutes' intervals; there are never less than four trains, two each way, in the Tunnel at the same time; each train contains some three hundred persons ... I could not destroy twelve hundred non-combatants without very special instructions."

And Lord Bury asked, "What would any minister, under such circumstances, do?"

As for the proposed defensive measure of flooding the tunnel in case of invasion, General Sir Lintorn Simmons, writing in the same issue ofThe Nineteenth Century, considered it to be a dubious one at best, since, he observed, "it is not to be believed that a great country like France, with the engineering talent she possesses, could not find the means" of pumping all the flood waters out again.

An assertion by Dr. Siemens, the electric-lighting expert, that the tunnel could easily be rendered unusable to invaders if its British defenders would pump carbonic-acid gas into it to asphyxiate the intruders, was similarly challenged, in the correspondence columns of theTimes, by a scientific colleagueof his, Dr. John Tyndall. Dr. Tyndall offered to wager Dr. Siemens that the latter could in six hours devise countermeasures that would enable troops to pass unscathed through the tunnel, gas or no gas. Dr. Tyndall illustrated his point by describing an experiment he said he had made on the very day of his letter, while coming down home from London by train, on a part of the South-Eastern line where the speed was thirty miles an hour:

I took out my watch and determined how long I could hold my breath without inhalation. By emptying my lungs very thoroughly, and then charging them very fully, I brought the time up to nearly a minute and a half. In this interval I might have been urged through more than half a mile of carbonic-acid gas with no injury and with little inconvenience to myself.

Dr. Tyndall concluded, firmly, "The problem of supplying fresh air to persons surrounded by an irrespirable atmosphere has been already solved by Mr. Fleuss and others."

Then there were even more disturbing objections. Could the defenders at the English end always be relied on as absolutely loyal Englishmen?The Field, without naming any names, wrote of "proof that in the United Kingdom itself ... there are numbers of daring and reckless persons" who, "to gain their sinister ends ... would not hesitate to sacrifice the independence of the country." Frankly, the paper feared possible acts of treachery in the tunnel by "a handful of unprincipled desperadoes." And theSpectator, visualizing the thing in more detail, suggested that its readers "consider ... the danger of treachery ... the rush on the tunnel being made by Irish Republicans in league with the French, while the wires of the telegraph were cut, and all swift communications between Dover and London suddenly suspended." Taking allthe risks of the tunnel into account, theSpectatorsaid it could not bring itself to believe that "even in this age, with its mania for rapid riding and comfortable locomotion, such a project will be tolerated." TheSunday Times, for its part, pointed out that, as things stood, "the silver streak is a greater bar to the movements of Nihilists [and] Internationalists ... than is generally believed." But, it added, "with several trains a day between Paris and London, we should have an amount of fraternising between the discontented denizens of the great cities of both countries, which would yield very unsatisfactory results on this side of the Channel."

Meetings and debates to discuss the tunnel menace were held all over England, and even at a meeting of so progressive an organization as the Balloon Society of Great Britain, which was held in the lecture room of the Royal Aquarium at Westminster, the subject was discussed with "some warmth of feeling ... on both sides." There was a wide circulation of sensational pamphlets, written in pseudohistorical style, that purported to chronicle the sudden downfall of England at the end of the nineteenth century through the existence of a Channel tunnel—Dover taken, the garrison butchered, the English end of the tunnel incessantly vomiting forth armed men, London invaded, and England enslaved—all of this in a few hours' time.

In contrast to these manifold cries of alarm among the English, it seems never to have occurred to anybody in France at the time seriously to suggest that if a tunnel were to be constructed, a hostile English force, supported by an English navy in control of the Channel sea, might suddenly seize the French entrance by surprise and use it as a bridgehead for a general invasion of France. A few French commentators did, however, remind the anti-tunnel forces in England that while the English had set hostile foot on French soil some two or three times in as many centuries—not to mentionher having kept physical control over the port of Calais for over two hundred years following the Battle of Crécy—English soil had remained untouched by France. Most of the French newspapers appeared to be unable to fathom the cause of the whole tunnel commotion, which was generally put down to English eccentricity. Several French journals, surveying all the fulminations on the other side of the Channel, even took an attitude toward the English of a certain detached sympathy. One of the more interesting French commentaries on the uproar in England appeared in theRevue des Deux Mondes. In this article, the author expressed some doubt that British military men who denounced the dangers of the tunnel were really convinced of the reality of those dangers. For them to do so, he suggested, one would have to presuppose, on one side of the Channel, a "France again a conqueror with, at her head, a man gifted with ... an incredible depth in crime; a secret, an almost incredible diligence in preparation as in execution," and, on the other side, "a governor of Dover who would be an idiot or a traitor, a War Minister who would not possess the brain of a bird, a Foreign Minister who would allow himself to be deceived in doltish fashion." How could the French possibly assemble perhaps a thousand railway carriages in England without arousing the suspicions of British Intelligence? How could the vanguard of the French invaders get through the tunnel with all their required ammunition, horses, and supplies, and get them all unloaded in a few minutes—would this vanguard sally forth without biscuits? The author found no solution to these particular problems. Instead, he devoted himself to the larger issue:

The day the inauguration of the Submarine Tunnel will be celebrated, England will no longer be an island, and that is a stupendousevent in the history of an island people.... Islanders have always considered themselves the favorites of Providence, which has undertaken to provide for their security and independence.... They congratulate themselves on their separation from the rest of the world by natural frontiers over which nobody can squabble. They feel that they hold their destiny in their own hands, and that the effect of the follies and crimes of others could not reach them.... Their character is affected by this. Like Great Britain, every Englishman is an island where it is not easy to land.

And the article asked, wonderingly, "What would an England that was not an island be?"

The deliberations of the scientific investigating committee appointed by the War Office and presided over by Sir Archibald Alison lasted from the latter part of February until the middle of May. In the committee's report of its findings to the War Office, the complexity and solemn nature of the questions laid before it were indicated by their mere classification and subclassification. Thus, the contingencies for rendering a Channel tunnel absolutely useless to an enemy were considered under the headings of:

I. Surprise from WithinII. Attack from Without

And the committee reported that it had considered measures to secure the tunnel against (I) under such subcategories as:

1. Fortifications2. Closure or temporary obstructions3. Explosion by mines or charges4. Floodinga. Temporaryb. Permanent

After reviewing the situation in great detail, and from every aspect, the committee suggested a long list of precautionary measures that, it said, it would be necessary to use, singly or in combination, to protect and seal off the tunnel against any enemy attempts to invade England directly through the tunnel or by seizing the English end from the outside and using it as a bridgehead for invasion. The list included these recommendations:

The mouth of the tunnel should be protected by "a portcullis or other defensible barrier."

A trap bridge should be set in connection with this portcullis.

Means should be provided for closing off the ventilation, and for "discharging irrespirable gases or vapors into the tunnel."

Arrangements should be made for rapidly discharging loads of shingle into the land portion of the tunnel, shutting it off.

The land portion of the tunnel should be thoroughly mined with explosives capable of being fired by remote control exercised not only from within the central fort at Dover but also from more distant points inland, so that even if the protective fortress fell to the enemy, the tunnel still could be permanently destroyed.

In addition, a truck loaded with explosives and equipped with a time fuse should be kept ready by the entrance, so that it could be sent coasting down into the tunnel for some distance, there to explode automatically.

Arrangements should be made for temporarily flooding the tunnel by means of culverts operated by sluice valves.("If by chance the sluice valves should not act, Measure XVIII could be resorted to, or the tunnel could be blocked by one or more of the means ... mentioned in Measures VIII, IX, X, XI, and XII.")

The tunnel should emerge inland, out of firing range from the sea. And it was imperative that it emerge under the guns and "in the immediate vicinity of a first-class fortress, in the modern acceptation of the term, a fortress which could only be reduced after a protracted siege both by land and sea."

And so on.

Even after drawing up all these elaborate precautions for closing the tunnel from the English end, the Channel Tunnel Defense Committee was left with some nagging doubts about their adequacy. In a concluding paragraph of its report, the committee pointed out that "it must always be borne in mind that, in dealing with physical agencies, an amount of uncertainty exists," and that it was "impossible to eliminate human fallibility." As a consequence, the members stated cautiously, "it would be presumptuous to place absolute reliance upon even the most comprehensive and complete arrangements."

The committee also agreed, almost as an afterthought, that the Channel tunnel proposed by Sir Edward Watkin could not be sanctioned in the form envisaged, on the grounds that it did not meet the committee's conditions for emerging inland, out of firing range from the sea, and in the immediate vicinity of a first-class fortress. It also rejected, on the first of these grounds, a proposal by the lesser Channel Tunnel Company for a tunnel that would start from within Dover and for the sake of easy destructibility run right under a nearby corner of Dover Castle—and on the grounds that this entrance would betoomuch in the vicinity of a fortress. And the committee objected that since the proposed entrance would emerge "in the heart of the maindefences and in the midst of the town" any fire from these defenses "would inflict great injury on the town and its inhabitants, and the general defence would be much embarrassed."

At the War Office, the report of the Alison committee was supplemented by another long memorandum on the tunnel question by Sir Garnet Wolseley. In this document of some twenty thousand words, which was conveniently furnished with numerous marginal headings like "Why tunnels through the Alps afford no argument in favor of the Channel Tunnel," "The Tunnel an acknowledged danger," "What national advantage then justifies its construction," "Many tunnels will be constructed," "What we owe to the Channel," and "Danger of surprise of our fortifications without warning! Fatal result!!," Sir Garnet recapitulated and elaborated at great length upon his previous arguments against the tunnel and added several new ones. Sir Garnet went into fine detail concerning the possibility of a sudden seizure of the English end of the tunnel and, simultaneously, Dover, by the French. For example, to his previous description of how hostile French forces might come by train through the tunnel dressed in ordinary clothes he added the detail that they might also travel in the carriages "at express speed, with the blinds down, in their uniforms and fully armed"—their co-conspirators at the other end meanwhile having rendered it "not likely that ticket-takers or telegraph operators on the French side would be allowed any channel of communicating with us until the operation had been effected." Sir Garnet was equally explicit about the situation at Dover. Warning that "the civilian may start in horror at the statement that Dover could also be taken by surprise," General Wolseley declared that, as things stood, anybody at all, any night, was free to walk up to any of the forts at Dover, and, "if he would announce himself to be an officer returning hometo barracks, the wicket would be opened to him, and if he entered he would see but two men, one the sentry, the other the noncommissioned officer who had been roused up from sleep by the sentry to unlock the gate." General Wolseley demonstrated how such a caller might well be "a dashing partisan leader" of a French raiding party that had landed in Dover in the dead of night, in calm or foggy weather, from steamers, and had already quietly knocked down and silenced any watchman or other witnesses in the dark area. He showed how such asoi-disantEnglish officer and his accomplices "might thus easily obtain an entrance into every fort in Dover; the sentry and the sleepy sergeant might be easily disposed of. The rifles of our sentries at home are not loaded, and the few men on guard [could be] made prisoners whilst asleep on their guard bed." Thus, General Wolseley said, the intruders could quickly effect the seizure of all the forts in Dover—"In an hour's time from the moment when our end of the tunnel was taken possession of by the enemy, large reinforcements could reach Dover through the tunnel, and ... before morning dawned, Dover might easily be in possession of 20,000 of the enemy, and every succeeding hour would add to that number." With Dover done in, London would be next, and the future commander-in-chief of the British Army went on to show how the enemy force, now swelled to 150,000 men, once it reached London and occupied the Thames from there to the arsenal at Woolwich, could dictate its own terms of peace, which he estimated at a rough guess as the payment of six hundred million pounds and the surrender of the British Fleet, with the English end of the tunnel remaining permanently in the hands of the French, so that "the perpetual yoke of servitude would be ours for ever."

Concerning all the various measures proposed to protect the tunnel, Sir Garnet had no confidence in them at all. He stressed once more the unreliability of anything mechanicalor electrical, and he added the new argument that whatever secret devices, such as mines, were installed in the tunnel for its protection were bound to come to the knowledge of the enemy sooner or later. Any military secret, General Wolseley said, was a purchasable secret; he illustrated his argument with an observation concerning a meeting between Napoleon I and Alexander I of Russia:

No two men were more loyally followed or had more absolute authority than Napoleon and Alexander. No two men had a stronger wish or stronger motive for keeping secret the words which passed between them personally in a most private conference in a raft in the middle of a river. Yet, by paying a large sum our Ministry obtained the exact terms of the secret agreement the two had there arrived at. Moreover, our Ministry obtained that information so immediately that they were able to act in anticipation of the designs formed by the two Emperors.

Finally, having discussed, in the most elaborate fashion, all the measures that his previous opposition to the scheme had caused to be proposed for the defense of the tunnel, Sir Garnet condemned them on the ground of their very elaborateness. "If in any one of these respects our security fails, it fails in all," he wrote of the multiple precautions recommended by Sir Archibald Alison's scientific committee. Thus, in General Wolseley's eyes, the defense of the tunnel was foredoomed as a self-defeating process, and was therefore a practical impossibility.

The question of the multiplicity of the proposed defenses was handled in different fashion in a further War Office memorandum on the tunnel, issued by the Duke of Cambridge, theArmy Commander-in-Chief and a cousin of Queen Victoria. "Nothing has impressed me more with the magnitude of the danger which the construction of this proposed tunnel would bring with it," the Duke of Cambridge wrote, "than the amount of precautions and their elaborateness [proposed by] this Scientific Committee.... If this danger was small, as some would have the country believe, why should all these complicated precautions be necessary?" The Duke of Cambridge fully endorsed the position taken by Sir Garnet Wolseley. He protested "most emphatically" against the construction of a Channel tunnel and "would most earnestly beg Her Majesty's Government" to consider with the utmost gravity the perils of surprise attack upon the country arising out of even a modified scheme that would take into account the recommendations of the Alison committee.

To his memorandum His Royal Highness appended a copy of a report that he had had his intelligence service put together specially in connection with the tunnel question—a long account purporting to show some hundred and seven instances occurring in the history of the previous two hundred years where hostilities between states had been started without any prior declaration of war, or even any decent notification.

If anything seemed likely to have been successfully blocked up and finished off under all this bombardment, it was Sir Edward Watkin's Channel-tunnel scheme. Curiously enough, the Board of Trade, which had ordered the tunnel workings stopped back in April and had no intention of issuing a working permit for them now, was not altogether convinced of this. In fact, since April the Board had been developing the suspicion that something peculiar might be going on down under the sea at Shakespeare Cliff. Back in the early part of April, the Board of Trade's order to the Submarine Continental Railway Company to stop its tunneling activities wasreceived, as one might expect, with some anguish. The first formal reaction was a letter from the permanent secretary of the company to T. H. Farrer, the secretary of the Board of Trade, saying that the company would of course acquiesce in the orders of the board, but begging, at the same time, to be allowed to continue the present gallery extending from the main, or Number Two, shaft at Shakespeare Cliff a short distance further, so as to be able to complete the first stage of the works—the junction of the main gallery with the new gallery extending from the ventilating, or Number Three, shaft. This letter was followed on April 9 by another from Sir Edward Watkin addressed to Joseph Chamberlain, the president of the Board of Trade, urgently repeating the request, this time on the ground of safety. Sir Edward wrote Mr. Chamberlain:

The moment the Board of the Tunnel Company decided to obey you, I peremptorily ordered the works to be stopped. The [boring] machine has been silent since Thursday evening. But the Engineer sends me a very startling report and warning.He fearsdefective ventilation[owing to stoppage of the air-driven boring machine] and danger to life—quite apart from depriving a fine body of skilled workmen of their bread, and general loss and damage in money. I can only reply to him that I am acting under your order. Still ... this is the first time the ventilation of a mine has been so interfered with. Should the engineer's alarm be well founded, and should men faint from bad air at the end of the gallery, there would be no means of getting them out alive.

He fearsdefective ventilation[owing to stoppage of the air-driven boring machine] and danger to life—quite apart from depriving a fine body of skilled workmen of their bread, and general loss and damage in money. I can only reply to him that I am acting under your order. Still ... this is the first time the ventilation of a mine has been so interfered with. Should the engineer's alarm be well founded, and should men faint from bad air at the end of the gallery, there would be no means of getting them out alive.

Sir Edward added, without changing his tone of humane agitation, that only the day before he had received a request from the Duke of Edinburgh to be allowed to see the tunnel workings, along with the Duchess, ten days hence, and that the Speaker of the House of Commons had already arranged to visit the tunnel "on Saturday, the 22nd, leaving Charing Cross at eleven." "What must be done?" he asked. Mr. Chamberlain replied promptly by telegraph that if the stopping of the machinery in the tunnel was constituting a danger to life, he authorized Sir Edward, pending further investigation of the situation by the Board of Trade, temporarily to keep the machinery going to the extent of preventing this danger. However, he followed up this telegram with a letter to Sir Edward in which he expressed himself as being "not able to understand the exact nature of the physical danger anticipated" by Sir Edward in the tunnel if the workings were stopped. "I do not see the necessity for workmen remaining in the tunnel where the ventilation is likely to be defective," Mr. Chamberlain observed. He added that he was making arrangements to have one of the Board of Trade inspectors visit the tunnel to investigate the situation.

On April 11, the Board of Trade duly telegraphed Sir Edward that its chief inspector of railways, Colonel Yolland, of the Royal Engineers, would be at Dover at noon the next day to investigate the ventilation problem in the tunnel. Sir Edward, however, wired back that he was unable to meet the Colonel at Dover that day and could not make an appointment with him "until after the visit to the works of the Duke of Edinburgh on Tuesday next."

To this the Board of Trade replied, on April 13, that Colonel Yolland had been instructed to visit the tunnel works "entirely out of regard to the very urgent and grave question raised in your letter ... respecting the ventilation of the boring" and that the department was finding it difficultto understand why Colonel Yolland's visit to the tunnel should be postponed. Sir Edward's answer to this was to invite Mr. Chamberlain down into the tunnel personally, so that Sir Edward could "show and explain everything," since "until you have seen, and had explained to you, on the spot as Mr. Gladstone did and had, and as we hope the Duke of Edinburgh will next Tuesday, the nature and condition of our works, it is, in my humble judgement, impossible to discuss the question with exactitude." He said nothing about the possibility of Mr. Chamberlain's or the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh's being asphyxiated in the tunnel. Mr. Chamberlain declined the invitation; he said he had ordered Colonel Yolland down to Dover immediately to report on the tunnel. But Colonel Yolland didn't get down into the tunnel to make an inspection that month. Some impediment, some unanticipated difficulty always seemed to arise when things appeared to be about to straighten themselves out. By the beginning of May, the Board of Trade, still trying, flatly informed Sir Edward that Colonel Yolland and Walter Murton, its solicitor, would inspect the tunnel workings on May 6. But on May 4 the general manager of the South-Eastern Railway replied that "Sir Edward Watkin wishes me to say that he regrets very much that it will be quite impossible to arrange for such inspection to take place on that date." He suggested that Sir Edward could arrange it for the 13th. The Board of Trade, replying immediately, insisted on its taking place "not later than Wednesday next." That letter was met with the answer that "Sir Edward Watkin is at present out of town, and is not expected to return until early next week." He must have stayed out of town quite a while, because the Board of Trade heard nothing from the company until May 18, when the directors of the company, writing jointly, told the department that while they acquiesced in the request of Colonel Yolland and Mr. Murton to visit the tunnel, unfortunately"the machinery is under repair," and as a consequence "it would not be ... safe for those gentlemen to go down the shaft." However, the directors added, hopefully, they felt sure that "by working the machinery, air compressors, and pumping engines for a few days and nights" their engineers could get everything in order for a proper tour of inspection. On May 24 Mr. Murton tried again. He wrote the tunnel proprietors, notifying them that "Colonel Yolland and myself propose to inspect the tunnel works on Saturday next the 27th instant." But the company's reply to the letter was regretful. It said that "the repairs to the winding engine cannot be completed until after Whitsuntide."

Meanwhile, Mr. Murton was having his difficulties with the solicitor of the South-Eastern over the legal question of the company's claims to ancient manorial rights to the use of the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff, as the tone of various letters he was obliged to write indicates. For example:

Dear Sir,May I remind you that I have not yet receivedthe abstract of title; I beg that you will at oncesend it to me...."I am, & c.,Walter Murton."

Dear Sir,

May I remind you that I have not yet receivedthe abstract of title; I beg that you will at oncesend it to me....

"I am, & c.,Walter Murton."

Or again:

Dear Sir,I am without answer to my letter of the 31stultimo. I beg you will let me know without furtherdelay whether you do or do not propose tosend me abstract of title."I am, & c.,Walter Murton."

Dear Sir,

I am without answer to my letter of the 31stultimo. I beg you will let me know without furtherdelay whether you do or do not propose tosend me abstract of title.

"I am, & c.,Walter Murton."

Or yet again:

Dear Sir,Will you kindly write me a reply to my letterswhich I can send on to the Board of Trade."Yours, & c.,Walter Murton."

Dear Sir,

Will you kindly write me a reply to my letterswhich I can send on to the Board of Trade.

"Yours, & c.,Walter Murton."

By June 9, the Board of Trade became quite out of patience over the matter of inspecting the tunnel. Introducing an ominous note, it informed Sir Edward that Mr. Chamberlain "feels that he must insist upon this visit of inspection, and if he understands that permission is refused, will be compelled to place the matter in the hands of his legal advisers, with the view of determining and enforcing the rights of the Crown." Sir Edward was indignant. In reply, he declared that he was being subjected to an "undeserved threat." Mr. Chamberlain, responding, denied that the threat was undeserved. He wrote firmly:

Hitherto, on one ground or another, this inspection has been again and again postponed.I am bound to guard the rights of the Crown in this matter, and I desire to ascertain whether those rights have up to the present time been in any way invaded.This is the object of the inspection, and as it will not brook delay ... I have only now to ask an immediate answer stating definitely when it can take place.

Hitherto, on one ground or another, this inspection has been again and again postponed.

I am bound to guard the rights of the Crown in this matter, and I desire to ascertain whether those rights have up to the present time been in any way invaded.

This is the object of the inspection, and as it will not brook delay ... I have only now to ask an immediate answer stating definitely when it can take place.

Sir Edward's answer was once more to beg Mr. Chamberlain himself to join a party of prominent visitors going down to see the tunnel; he added that "Colonel Yolland shall be at once communicated with."

But by various intervening circumstances—joint letters got up by the tunnel promoters to the Prime Minister and tothe Board of Trade protesting hard treatment, and so on—the Board of Trade found itself brooking delays all through the month of June. On June 26, the Board of Trade wrote in stern fashion to Sir Edward that the demands of the Board of Trade to inspect the tunnel workings "have been repeatedly formulated and persistently evaded on behalf of the Submarine Continental Railway Company," and that the only way the company could avoid legal action by the Crown was "to consentat onceto the proposed inspection." There was no satisfactory reply from the tunnel proprietors, and on July 5 the Board of Trade, after due notification to the Submarine Continental Railway Company, obtained an order from Mr. Justice Kay, in the High Court of Justice, restraining the tunnel promoters and their employees from "further working or excavating, or taking or interfering with any chalk, soil, or other substance" in the Channel tunnel without the consent of the Board of Trade, and ordering them to give the department access to the tunnel to inspect the workings. In the course of these judicial proceedings, a number of affidavits presented to Mr. Justice Kay by the Government revealed the interesting information that the Board of Trade, finding itself unable to obtain access for its inspectors into the tunnel, for some time past had felt itself obliged to station watchers on top of Shakespeare Cliff and on the sea regularly to spy upon the tunnel workings and to count the number of bucketfuls of soil it maintained had been removed from the workings. And, according to all its calculations, the Board of Trade had little doubt that the proprietors of the Submarine Continental Railway Company were deliberately and surreptitiously tunneling under the sea below low-water mark, on Crown property, and burrowing into and removing chalk of the realm.

Intimation of what was in store for him in the High Court of Justice reached Sir Edward Watkin at the very time thathe was showing a party of distinguished people, including Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, around the tunnel. A glimpse of that interesting visit is contained in a report in the LondonTimes:

M. de Lesseps, while down in the tunnel and under the sea, proposed the health of the Queen, remarking that the completion of the work was required in the interest of mankind.When all the visitors were again above ground, luncheon was served in a marquee.Sir E. Watkin, in proposing the health of M. de Lesseps, remarked that there were those in our country who seemed to consider that the work of the company they had just inspected was a crime. He had just received a telegram informing him that he would have to answer on Wednesday next at the instigation of the President of the Board of Trade before a court of law for having committed the crime of carrying on these experiments. (Hisses and groans.)

M. de Lesseps, while down in the tunnel and under the sea, proposed the health of the Queen, remarking that the completion of the work was required in the interest of mankind.

When all the visitors were again above ground, luncheon was served in a marquee.

Sir E. Watkin, in proposing the health of M. de Lesseps, remarked that there were those in our country who seemed to consider that the work of the company they had just inspected was a crime. He had just received a telegram informing him that he would have to answer on Wednesday next at the instigation of the President of the Board of Trade before a court of law for having committed the crime of carrying on these experiments. (Hisses and groans.)

Somewhat revealingly, Sir Edward added, when the signs of indignation subsided, that

For his own part, if he was to be committed by a court of law for contempt, he should have this consolation—that the proceedings which had been taken against him had been delayed sufficiently long to enable him with his colleagues to have the honor of entertaining M. de Lesseps, in whom he should have a witness, if he had to call one, to prove that they had been engaged in a work which had been as successful as he believed it would be ultimately useful.

At long last, supported by all the might of the Crown, Colonel Yolland got to the tunnel on July 8 to make his inspection of the workings. But upon his arrival there he found, to his chagrin, that "I was not provided, at the time ... with all the necessary means for making the measurements, and taking the requisite bearings" in the tunnel, and he was obliged to put his inspection off once more. Properly equipped, he descended into the tunnel a week later, on Saturday, July 15, and inspected everything, including the boring apparatus that Sir Edward had insisted had to be used to ventilate the gallery and prevent loss of life. What Colonel Yolland found there caused the Board of Trade, five days later, to send a most severe letter to the tunnel proprietors. In it, the Board declared:

1. That the means of ventilating the tunnel could have been and be so readily disconnected from the boring machine (i.e., by the movement of a single lever that would pour a stream of compressed air coming from the supply pipe directly into the tunnel) that it has never been necessary that a single inch of cutting should have taken place in order to protect life or to secure ventilation, nor can such necessity arise in the future.2. That in spite of the repeated orders of the Board of Trade, and the assurances of the Secretary of the Submarine Railway Company and Sir Edward Watkin himself that those orders were acquiesced in and submitted to, the substantial work of boring has nevertheless been carried to a distance of more than 600 yards from low-water mark (thus constituting a trespass on the property of the Crown).

2. That in spite of the repeated orders of the Board of Trade, and the assurances of the Secretary of the Submarine Railway Company and Sir Edward Watkin himself that those orders were acquiesced in and submitted to, the substantial work of boring has nevertheless been carried to a distance of more than 600 yards from low-water mark (thus constituting a trespass on the property of the Crown).

Calling these acts "a flagrant breach of faith" on the part of the tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade wrote that henceforth the order of the court "must be strictly and literally adhered to," and that no work of maintenance, ventilation, drainage, or otherwise would be allowed without the express permission of the board. Sir Edward Watkin and his fellow directors, after some days, replied in hurt fashion to what they termed "the unjustified accusations directed against them." They reiterated their concern for the health of their employees in the tunnel, and in connection with their tunneling activities below low-water mark they came up with the ingenious explanation that "many visits of Royal and other personages have been, by request, made to the tunnel for purposes of inspection, and it was essential fully to work the machine from time to time for the purpose of such visits." They also sent a protest to Mr. Gladstone at 10 Downing Street against their hard treatment, and asked for the Prime Minister's intercession with the Board of Trade. But there was nothing doing. Mr. Gladstone politely refused to act and replied that the actions of the Board of Trade had the full sanction of the Government.

On August 5, Colonel Yolland descended once more into the tunnel to make an inspection. He found things there in a rather run-down condition. "The tunnel is not nearly so dry as it was when I first saw it," he wrote in his report to the Board of Trade, referring to the fact that the engineers had ceased work on the drainage of the gallery. Colonel Yolland also mentioned in his report that during his previous visit, on July 15, "I had an escape from what might have been a serious accident. The wet chalk in the bottom of the tunnel, between and outside the rails of the tramways, is so slippery and greasy that it is almost impossible to keep on one's feet; and, on one occasion, I suddenly slipped, and fell at full length on my back, and the back of my head came againstone of the iron rails of the tramway—fortunately with no great force or my skull might have been seriously bruised or fractured." The Colonel added, "There is not light enough in the tunnel from the electric lamps to enable one to see one's way through ... so that it is necessary to carry a lamp in one hand and a note-book in the other, to record the different measurements." The Colonel then gave some startling news. He declared that, according to his measurements, somebody had advanced the length of the tunnel some seventy yards since his inspection on July 15.

When this report reached the Board of Trade, the department, outraged, made a motion before the High Court of Justice to cite the tunnel promoters for contempt. However, a cloud of doubt descended on the issue when the tunnel promoters claimed in court that Colonel Yolland's calculations were in error. The motion was put off with the promoters' promising to obey to the letter the demands of the Board of Trade. Later on in the month, Colonel Yolland, after making a further inspection, conceded that, owing to the difficulties of working in the tunnel, he had made some error of calculation. The true advance made in the tunnel since July 15, he said, was thirty-six yards—a figure he said was confirmed by the tunnel company's engineer. Colonel Yolland reported that the company engineers had installed a pump at the eastern end of the tunnel to force out the water accumulating there. He added, somewhat testily, "Of course men had to be employed in erecting this pump in the tunnel and in working it when it was ready, and as the boring machine has not been made use of for the purpose of cutting chalk, this ... conclusively proves what I had stated in my former reports, that it was not necessary to cut an inch of chalk for the purpose of ventilating and draining the tunnel."

Altogether, and with all the difficulties they had encountered, the tunnel promoters had succeeded in boring the tunnelfor a distance of 2,100 yards, or a little less than a mile and a quarter, toward France. The operations at the French end, which came to a stop in March of 1883, completed 2,009 yards of pilot tunnel from the bottom of the shaft by the cliffs at Sangatte.

In the middle of August, the Government, having received all the reports from the War Office and the Board of Trade on the subject of the tunnel, caused the rival Channel-tunnel bills that had been brought before it to be set aside, and at the same time Mr. Chamberlain announced in the House of Commons that the Government had decided to propose, early the following year, the appointment of a Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons to dispose of the whole tunnel question as conclusively as possible. In the meantime, he announced the Government's intention of publishing a Blue Book containing all the principal documents and correspondence concerning the tunnel. The Blue Book was issued in October, and once again the wrath of the English press fell upon the tunnel project and its promoters. The tone of the press comment was most majestically represented by an editorial in the LondonTimes, which had started off the press campaign against the project the year before. TheTimeswrote that, unless it was much mistaken, "the publication of the Blue Book will be found to have closed the whole question of the Channel Tunnel for a long time to come."

Undermined by land, overmined at sea, sluice-ridden at its entrance, and liable to asphyxiating vapors at intervals, the Tunnel will hardly be regarded by nervous travellers as a very pleasant alternative even to the horrors of seasickness....The whole system of defense must forever beat the mercy of blunderers, criminals, and madmen. It is true that we take somewhat similar risks in ordinary railway travelling, but imagination counts for a good deal in such matters, and the terrors of the Channel Tunnel under an adequate system of defense might easily affect the imagination so strongly as to render the terrors of seasickness insignificant by comparison.

The whole system of defense must forever beat the mercy of blunderers, criminals, and madmen. It is true that we take somewhat similar risks in ordinary railway travelling, but imagination counts for a good deal in such matters, and the terrors of the Channel Tunnel under an adequate system of defense might easily affect the imagination so strongly as to render the terrors of seasickness insignificant by comparison.

Caught between the forces of claustrophobia and xenophobia, Sir Edward Watkin's great tunnel project was just about done for. In Westminster, angry citizens exhibited their feelings by smashing all the windows of the Channel Tunnel Company offices there. In the following year, the promised new investigation into the tunnel question was undertaken by a joint Parliamentary committee presided over by Lord Landsdowne. The committee met fourteen times, examined forty witnesses, and asked them fifty-three hundred and ninety-six questions. Not unexpectedly, the witnesses included Sir Garnet Wolseley, now Lord Wolseley. That Lord Wolseley in the interim had not changed his opinions on the perilous consequences of a tunnel is evident from his response to just five of the hundreds of questions put to him by the committee members.

5233: ... I think you said that supposing anyone in this room were to go to the barrack gates [at any of the forts at Dover at night] and to knock at the door, the door would at once be opened?—The wicket would be opened to you.5234: Would it be the case if the person who went there had a hundred men in his company?—The man inside would not know that he hadthem, he would never suspect a hundred men being outside; but I would go further and say, even supposing that he would not open the barrack gates, the barrack gates are very easily knocked in.5235: Are there any drawbridges there?—There are, but they are very seldom, if ever, drawn up in Dover.5236: You said that if the tunnel were in existence, it would be necessary that the conditions of life in Dover should be altered; would that be one of the conditions which would be altered?—Yes.5237: And the drawbridges would be up at night?—The drawbridges would be up at night, and nobody would be allowed to go in or out after a certain hour.

5234: Would it be the case if the person who went there had a hundred men in his company?—The man inside would not know that he hadthem, he would never suspect a hundred men being outside; but I would go further and say, even supposing that he would not open the barrack gates, the barrack gates are very easily knocked in.

5235: Are there any drawbridges there?—There are, but they are very seldom, if ever, drawn up in Dover.

5236: You said that if the tunnel were in existence, it would be necessary that the conditions of life in Dover should be altered; would that be one of the conditions which would be altered?—Yes.

5237: And the drawbridges would be up at night?—The drawbridges would be up at night, and nobody would be allowed to go in or out after a certain hour.

When all the evidence was in, a majority of the joint Parliamentary committee sided with the views of Lord Wolseley and voted against any Parliamentary sanction's being given to a Channel tunnel.

Sir Edward Watkin kept right on promoting his tunnel project for quite a while. By 1884—a year, incidentally, when Lord Wolseley was called away from the country to command the British expeditionary force that arrived too late at Khartoum to relieve General Gordon—Sir Edward was still doing his best to bring the British Army around to his viewpoint on the tunnel. A series of contemporary illustrations in the London illustrated weekly publicationThe Graphicrecords some views of a tunnel party held during that year for a group of British Army officers. One of the engravings shows a number of officers preparing to descend into the tunnel; the caption reads, "I say, Dear Chappie, ifwe invade France through the Tunnel, I hope I shan't be told off to lead the Advanced Guard." The visit was further reported on in an accompanying article by one of a few journalists accompanying the party. From this, it appears that the condition of the tunnel hadn't improved since the time that Colonel Yolland nearly split his head open in it. "Under foot for a great portion of the way," the author said, in describing how the visitors were drawn along the long gallery on canvas-hooded trolleys, "was ankle deep in slush," and he went on to quote from the report of one of his colleagues:

Onward to no sound, save the splashing made by the tall workmen [who drew the trolleys] tramping through the mud and the drip, drip, drip of the water upon the hood above our heads, we are dragged and pushed ... under the bed of the Channel.... Sometimes, in the fitful flashes of light, the eye rests on falling red rivulets, like streams of blood, flowing down the damp walls. So we go on until the electric lamps cease altogether, and the long, awful cave is enveloped in a darkness that would be impenetrable but for the glimmer of a few tallow candles stuck into the bare walls of the cutting.

At the end of the tunnel the action of the boring machine was briefly demonstrated, this time by special permission of the Board of Trade, and then the party was escorted out of the tunnel and taken to a good lunch, presumably at the Lord Warden Hotel. Another engraving in the same issue ofThe Graphicshows members of the same party of officers, chairs drawn slightly back, sitting about a luncheon table. The monocled guests, ranged on each side of a clutter of bottles, potted ferns, place cards, and an interesting variety of glasses—including, as one can see fairly clearly, champagneglasses, claret glasses, and hock glasses—are being addressed by a bearded speaker. They look dazed. Yet while using his best softening-up techniques on the Army officers, Sir Edward did not let up his fire on his principal opponents among the military. Thus, during 1884, when he reintroduced his Tunnel Bill on the floor in Parliament (it was rejected by 222 votes to 84) he ridiculed the anti-tunnel generals for publicly confessing an inability to cope with defending a frontier "no bigger than the door of the House of Commons." Dealing with the question of British insularity, he also introduced the argument that since France and England had once been united as part of the same continental land mass his opponents, in refusing to unite them again, were openly showing distrust of the wisdom of Providence in having created the connection in the first place. This last assertion really incensed the editors of the LondonTimes, who had been steadily invoking Providence as their ally against the tunnel all along. TheTimesran an editorial declaring angrily that no stronger reason could be found for distrusting the whole tunnel scheme than the fact that Sir Edward had been reduced to using such an argument. TheTimesadded, severely, "Ordinary people will probably be content to take the world as it appears in historic times. Everything that we possess and are—our character, our language, our freedom, our institutions, our religion, our unviolated hearths, and our far-extended Empire—we owe to the encircling sea; and when Englishmen try to penetrate the designs of Providence they will not seek them in geological speculations, but will rather thank Him Who 'isled us here.'"

Sir Edward, in his indomitable fashion, not only pursued his geological speculations but also kept pursuing the tunnel question in Parliament. In 1887, a year in which he changed the name of the Submarine Continental Railway Company to that of the Channel Tunnel Company (he had taken over thelong-moribund rival company in 1886), he went on such a powerful campaign on behalf of a new Channel Tunnel Bill that it was defeated in the House by only seventy-six votes. In 1888, he tried again, and even managed to persuade Mr. Gladstone, now the leader of the Opposition, that the Channel could be tunneled under with propriety. As a result, Mr. Gladstone, in June 1888, gave his personal support to Sir Edward's Tunnel Bill and delivered a long Parliamentary speech on the subject. In this dissertation the venerable statesman, while taking nothing back about the wisdom of Providence in placing the Channel where it was, said he had now come to feel that a Channel tunnel could be used "without altering in any way our insular character or insular security, to give us some of the innocent and pacific advantages of a land frontier." But even Mr. Gladstone's support couldn't swing it. Parliament would not agree to the tunnel. At last, after all these setbacks, Sir Edward had to consider the tunnel project as a lost cause, if only temporarily. He stopped promoting it in 1894, having become involved in the meantime in a couple of alternate projects—a railway tunnel between Scotland and Ireland and a ship canal in Ireland between Dublin and Galway. Also, in 1889, he had become chairman of a company to erect at Wembley Park, near London, a great iron tower, modeled on the Eiffel Tower, which was to be known as the Watkin Tower. The Watkin Tower didn't get very high. Only a single stage was completed, and this was opened to the public in 1896; it was demolished eleven years later. Sir Edward Watkin died at Northenden, Cheshire, in 1901.

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