An editorialist in a periodical called All 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 hypothetical nervous 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 in John Bull declared. The London Daily News demanded to know whether "anyone who is in the least acquainted with English character and history" could deny the country's susceptibility to periodic panics. The Daily News dwelt 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 of The Nineteenth Century, Major-General Sir E. Hamley raised the question of whether the French, invading Britain by 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 in The Nineteenth Century Lord 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 of The 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 the Times, by a scientific colleague of 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: