Then, on hands and knees, we crawled against the pommeling wind to the very edge of the cliff, and lying on our stomachs peered straight down upon the site of the Shakespeare Cliff tunnel. I still had traces of the headache I had picked up while creeping around in the depths of the Abbots Cliff tunnel and it was a dizzying change for me now to peer three hundred feet down a sheer cliff face, but it was worth it, even though there was nothing so startling to see. Far below us lay a plateau with a couple of railway sidings on it. There were no buildings about, and certainly nothing that resembled any trace of a mine entrance. "British Railways had to build a sea wall around the whole Shakespeare Cliff area a few years ago because of the erosion from the Channel, and when we were doing that we cleaned out all the old mine workings," Adams said. "One of the last buildings to go was a shed that the old custodian of the works used to live in. His name was Charlie Gatehouse. He died about ten years ago at the age of ninety. He had worked as a timberman on both the Abbots Cliff and Shakespeare Cliff tunnels, and he took up the first sod when they dug the shaft down here. He used to tell about how one day Mr. Gladstone came down into the tunnel."

Then Adams pointed out to me exactly where the entrance to Number Two shaft had been. It lay by the third rain puddle to the left near one of the sidings. I enjoyed the thought of having its location fixed in my mind, and I believe Mr. Adams did, too. We gazed down silently. "Just imagine, if the Board of Trade hadn't stopped the works, a man might have been able to go right on to Vladivostock without getting out of his train," Adams said after a while. And he added earnestly, "But I think they'll build the tunnel yet."

Since my visit to the tunnel, the tendency of events has been to reinforce the brave hopes of Adams and his fellow pro-tunnelers. To be sure, while even the most dedicated of tunnel promoters may be prone to his black moments while pondering the nature and the effects of traditional British insularity—one of the most distinguished, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the president of the Tunnel Study Group, a while ago observed with some touch of bitterness that it seemed as though "men may be flying to the moon before Britons can make a reasonable surface journey to Paris"—Britain's decision to seek full membership in the European Common Market, and the agreement of the French and British Governments to hold official talks on the construction of either a tunnel or a bridge across the Channel, have given the pro-tunnelers more solid reason for hope than perhaps has ever existed in the ranks of these visionaries in a century and a half. In the past, it was never possible for proponents of the tunnel to advance their cause with any success so long as their advocacy was not based on the prior existence of any profound change in Britain's traditional economic and strategic special and separate place in Europe, or of any change in the peculiar British sense of being an island people apart. But now such changes have taken place, or are in the process of taking place. Britain's strategic position has been profoundly altered by the advent of nuclear and rocket armaments. Her political and economic position has been as profoundly altered by the withering away of the British Empire and by the successful emergence of a new European commonwealth in the form of the Common Market. And the ancient British sense of being an island race apart seems to have been steadily eroded by a strange kind of rootlessness, partly arising out of Britain's altered place in the world, and as a general accompaniment of the intrusion of such uninsular influences as the jet airplane, commercial television, high-powered advertising, expense-account living, and the spread of installment buying. Notwithstanding all her misgivings on the subject of committing herself to abandonment of her ancient aloofness from the Continent, Britain can hardly ignore the implications of the relentless march of that process once described by the Duke of Wellington over a century ago in the heyday of the sailing ship, when he observed that Britain and the Continent were rapidly becoming joined by an "isthmus of steam."

Now that so many of the conditions that have made for England's traditional economic, military, and cultural insularity have gradually subsided, like the ancient Wealden Island that once lay in what is now the Strait of Dover, the question of connecting Britain physically to the Continent is at last in the realm of practical political possibility. In spite of all her misgivings about the abandonment of her privileged relationships with the countries of the British Commonwealth, it seems as though Britain has no choice ahead but to throw in her lot with the Common Market, which has proved itself to be such an astonishing success in its four years of existence.

Since 1958, when the special trade arrangements between the countries of the European Economic Community went into effect, up to 1960, their industrial production increased by 22 per cent, while Britain's industrial production increased only 11 per cent. And it has been estimated that by 1970 the Gross National Product of the Common Market countries will double that of 1961. This estimate does not take into account Britain's joining the Common Market, either; when she does so, as it seems she must, the Common Market boom will be a spectacular one; the member countries will then be serving a market of more than 200 million people. Precisely what Britain's entry into the Common Market would mean in terms of increased commercial intercourse between Britain and the Continent no one knows, but the increase plainly would be enormous, and considering this potentiality, proponents of the Channel tunnel are not backward in claiming that Britain's present cross-Channel transportation facilities are grossly inadequate to meet the demands ahead. They are even inadequate, the pro-tunnelers claim, for coping with Britain's present needs.

As things stand, some 8 million passengers and about 400,000 vehicles cross the Channel in a year. Of these, 3.3 million passengers and about 100,000 vehicles go by air. Most of this traffic crisscrosses the Channel in the four peak summer months and results in severe bottlenecks in the existing means of communication. (A motorist who wishes to take his car abroad either by air or sea-ferry during the peak season must book a passage some months ahead of time, and if he can't make it on the assigned date "he runs the risk," as one of the tunnel promoters has put it, "of being marooned on this island for several more months.") Even without taking into account Britain's probable entry into the Common Market, the number of vehicles crossing Britain and the Continent probably will double itself by 1965.

The Channel Tunnel Study Group people claim that neither the existing air nor sea-ferry services are equipped to handle anything like this potential load. They estimate that without construction of a tunnel, the British and French Governments, through their nationalized rail and air lines, will be obliged to spend some $90,000,000 in the next five years to replace or expand existing transport facilities if they are to keep up with the increase in cross-Channel traffic expected in that time without Britain's participation in the Common Market. As for the capacity of the tunnel, the promoters claim that all the road vehicles that crossed the Channel in 1960 could easily be carried through the tunnel in three or four days. As for the transporting of merchandise, 11,000,000 tons of it are now being moved across the Channel in a year, most of this in bulk form—coal, for example—which it would not be practical to send through a tunnel. But of this freight, well over a million tons of nonbulk goods could, the Study Group declares, be sent by tunnel, and at about half the rates now prevailing.

Taking into account such economic advantages, the great boon to tourism that they believe a tunnel would represent, and the intangible psychological impetus that they claim a fixed link between France and Britain would give to the dream of a politically as well as economically united Europe, the pro-tunnelers believe that the construction of their railway under the Channel would be just about the greatest thing to happen to Britain in this century.

The Channel Tunnel Study Group people, as it turned out late last year, are not alone in their ambitions for a physical connection between France and Britain. Last fall, when the French and British Governments decided—on British initiative—to negotiate with each other on a fixed connection between the two countries, it became clear that a dark horse had been entered in the Channel sweepstakes with the publicizing of the new proposal for a cross-Channel bridge made by a new French company that is headed by Jules Moch, a former French Minister of Interior. The bridge proposed by the new French company would be a multipurpose affair of steel capable of carrying not only two railroad lines but five lanes of motor traffic and even two bicycle tracks. It would extend between Dover and a point near Calais. Its width would be 115 feet and its height 230 feet, allowing (as the Tunnel Study Group's proposed bridge scheme would) ample clearance for the largest ocean liners afloat. Its length would be 21 miles; it would rest on 164 concrete piles 65 feet in diameter and sunk 660 feet apart. Motorists would travel along it, without any speed limit, at a peak rate of 5,000 vehicles an hour, and an average toll of about $22.50 per car. The bridge would take between four and six years to construct, and as for the cost, that would run to about $630,000,000—or $266,000,000 more than the estimated cost of a rail tunnel. Despite some backing that the new French bridge group appears to have established for its scheme among French commercial circles, the chances are that the British Government, as representatives of a maritime nation, will have a number of objections to this plan for spanning the Channel. A principal objection—a technical one that has confounded all the Channel bridge planners from Thomé de Gamond's day onward—is the hazard to navigation within the Strait of Dover that a bridge would create. The English Channel is one of the most heavily trafficked sea lanes in the world, and considering the violent state of wind and sea within the Strait of Dover for much of the year—as well as the heavy Channel fogs—insuring safe passage between the piers of such a bridge for all the thousands of ships that pass through the Strait every year, in all weathers, would pose formidable problems even in the era of radar. Also, the Channel-tunnel advocates, who already have considered a bridge and pretty much rejected the idea because of its high cost, point to other difficulties standing in the way of the bridge idea—for example, the requirements of international law, which would make necessary a special treaty signed by all countries (including Russia) presently sending ships through the Channel before such an obstruction to navigation could be constructed; the difficulties, with all the bad weather, of keeping such an enormous structure in good repair; and the dangers of Channel gales to light European cars traversing the bridge. (The French bridge advocates claim that they could reduce the winds buffeting traffic to a quarter of their intensity by installing deflectors on the sides of the traffic lanes; to this the tunnel advocates counter that boxing cars in traffic lanes for some twenty-one miles would create a psychological sense of confinement that drivers would find far more intimidating than riding on a train under the sea.) But the main objection to the bridge is its cost. It could only be built with the help of substantial government subsidies, and the experience of the pro-tunnelers is that such subsidies are almost impossible to obtain.

Whatever the merits of the two schemes, they are certain to be considered in quite a different atmosphere now than they were back in the seventies, when, according to the observations that Sir Garnet Wolseley subsequently made to Sir Archibald Alison's scientific committee that investigated the tunnel question, "the tunnel scheme was ... looked upon as fanciful and unfeasible. It was not then regarded as having entered within the zone or scope of practical undertakings. No one believed that it would ever be made and, if mentioned, it always raised a smile, as does now any reference to flying machines as substitutes for railways." On August 28, 1961, things somehow seemed to come full circle when the London Times, which had started all the opposition in the press to the tunnel eighty years earlier, devoted a leading editorial to discussion of the subject of a fixed connection between France and Britain. The Times started out in familiar fashion for a tunnel editorial by quoting from Shakespeare's "This royal throne" speech, but then it went on to concede in stately fashion that times had changed and that "Britain must soon decide whether to leap over the wall, to become a part of Europe." The Times discussed the merits of the latest tunnel and bridge schemes in tones of expository reasonableness, without committing itself to either one scheme or the other, and without accusing the would-be moat-crossers, as of old, of flaunting the will of Providence. And the Times wound up its editorial on a meaningful note by observing, in reference to the quotations with which the editorial had been prefaced, that while Shakespeare had the first words, John Donne deserved the last: