Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands....
The editor went on to declare, more prosaically, that "To hang the safety of England at some most critical instant upon the correct working of a tap, or of any mechanical contrivance, is quite beyond the faith of this generation of Englishmen."
Almost at the instant that the heavy blow of the petition in The Nineteenth Century fell upon the tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade sent down a real thunderbolt upon their heads. On April 1, the Board of Trade wrote Sir Edward Watkin that, whatever might be the title to the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff, there was no doubt as to the title of the Crown under the bed of the sea below low-water mark and within the three-mile limit. It informed him that according to the department's calculations, based on a tracing of the tunnel route previously obtained from the Submarine Continental Railway Company, the boring of the tunnel now must necessarily be close to the point of low-water mark. And, as a consequence, the Board of Trade instructed the company that, pending the outcome of the Government's deliberations on the military security of the tunnel, it must suspend its boring operations forthwith and give the Government assurances to that effect.
Footnotes.
[ [1] An Anglo-French Joint Commission formed to set up agreements on the jurisdiction of the two countries over the Channel tunnel in 1876 actually drew up a protocol for a channel-tunnel treaty between England and France. The Commission agreed to the jurisdiction of each government ceasing at a point to be marked in the center of the tunnel and it recommended that the tunnel be regulated by a specially appointed international body.
Four
All at once, it seems, the entire British press was in an uproar of criticism against the Channel tunnel and its unfortunate promoters. The Sunday Times pretty 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 final coup 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 of The 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 a friend 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."