8
escort; and send an Aide de Camp on the Colonel's horse to the nearest Telegraph Office to report all the statum in quo; and that the enemy is not only in possession of the Channel Tunnel, but of Dover Castle, and we suppose of the Fort also, as it is silent: and that, as for the rest, all that we know is nothing can be known; except that at the other end of that submarine Channel Tunnel Railway Bridge, now in the hands of the enemy, is France, with an army of four hundred thousand soldiers! 400,000 willing soldiers!!
If these most grave and startling dangers be easy for me, a military man by prescience alone, to anticipate; would not the completion of the Channel Tunnel cause them, and many more that the gallant General may see, to be constantly floating in the minds of the French, a Nation essentially military, till they became like a Magazine of Dynamite explosive by the smallest spark or jar; or like a mighty, swollen, overflowing river, uncontrollable, and reckless alike of banks and boundaries?
And now. How will stand the Balance of National Gain and Loss? The Channel Tunnel Scheme panders to the avarice of certain Civil Engineers, who gratify their own vanity, and raise their reputation, by foisting it upon the Publick as something marvellous; and also a system of ventilation by means of Engines worked by compressed air: whereas, First, every Norfolk miner knows, that he can tunnel to any length through Chalk: and every bricklayer knows, that if a regular archway be cut through Chalk, he can line it with an arch of brickwork and cement to any thickness required.
So far, then, from the Scheme being marvellous, an Engineering Work of which the Nation should be proud; the praise is alone due to the Geologists who can prove, that the substratum from Albion's Cliffs to Calais is Chalk. If such knowledge be assured, the carrying out of the Channel Tunnel Scheme is merely a question of time: and, Secondly, that comparatively very limited, if the Tunnel be driven, as it might be, by the really marvellous Tunnelling Engine of Captain Herbert Penrice (late an Officer in the Royal Engineers and in the Crimean War); which he drives by means of compressed air; which he adopted, in tunnelling through the Alps, with the effect of supplying ventilation in Tunnels while he is making them.
