Behind all the sociability and the stream of publicity engendered in the press by the visits of well-known people to the tunnel, the situation was not quite so promising. While the physical boring was going ahead smoothly enough in the Lower Chalk, the promotion of the tunnel as a full-scale project was encountering growing resistance from within the upper crust of The Establishment. The fact seems to be that the British Government had never felt altogether easy about the idea of the Channel tunnel from the start, and although it had never formally expressed any misgivings about the scheme as a whole, it had always been careful not to associate itself with the enterprise, and its attitude toward its progress generally had been one of reluctant acquiescence. Whatever disquiet people in government felt about the tunnel project appears to have been expressed in three general ways—first, in the introduction of caveats of a military nature; second, in proposals to delay the progress of the scheme on other than military grounds; and third, in a general, nameless suspicion of the whole idea. Such reservations had been evident even in 1875, when the Channel Tunnel Company applied to Parliament for powers to carry out experimental work at St. Margaret's Bay. To exemplify the first kind of reservation put forward, the Board of Trade, the governmental department under whose surveillance such commercial schemes came, made a point of insisting that for defense purposes the Government must retain absolute power to "erect and maintain such [military] works at the English mouth of the Tunnel as they may deem expedient," and in case of actual or threatened war to close the tunnel down. As for the tendency of governmental people to find other grounds for objection in the project, this could be exemplified by the delaying action of the Secretary to the Treasury, when in 1875 it looked as though Parliament were about to take action on the Channel-tunnel bill. In a memorandum to the Foreign Office, the Secretary sought to have the tunnel bill laid aside at the last moment of its consideration before Parliament so that the answers to all sorts of important jurisdictional questions could be sought—for example, "If a crime were committed in the Tunnel, by what authority would it be cognizable?"[1] And as for the third, unnamed kind of objection, Queen Victoria, who, with her late husband (Prince Albert died in 1861), had once been so enthusiastic about the idea of a Channel tunnel, simply changed her mind about the entire business; in February of 1875, the Queen wrote Disraeli, without elaborating, that "she hopes that the Government will do nothing to encourage the proposed tunnel under the Channel which she thinks very objectionable."