These remarks of Mr. Gladstone's on the Channel appear to have made a powerful impression on opinion in upper-class England; for many years after their publication his partly Shakespearean phrase, "the streak of silver sea"—or a variation of it, "the silver streak"—remained as a standard term in the vocabulary of Victorian patriotism. Not surprisingly, considering his views in 1870, the attitude of Mr. Gladstone in 1881 and 1882, during his term as Prime Minister, toward the plan of Sir Edward Watkin to undermine those Straits the statesman had so extolled was an equivocal one. Indeed, quite a number of people in and around Whitehall had considerably stronger reservations about the Channel-tunnel project than Mr. Gladstone did. These misgivings had to do with fears that a completed tunnel under the Channel might form a breach in England's traditional defense system, and in June of 1881 they first came to public notice in the form of an editorial in the _Times_. Discussing the Channel-tunnel project, the _Times_, while conceding that "As an improvement in locomotion, and as a relief to the tender stomachs of passengers who dread seasickness, the design is excellent," went on to observe that "from a national [and military] point of view it must not the less be received with caution." And the paper asked, "Shall we be as well off and as safe with it as we now are without it? Will it be possible for us so to guard the English end of the passage that it can never fall into any other hands than our own?" The _Times_ frankly doubted it, and questioned whether, if the tunnel were built, "a force of some thousands of men secretly concentrated in a [French] Channel port and suddenly landed on the coast of Kent" might not be able by surprise to seize the English end of the tunnel and use it as a bridgehead for a general invasion of England. At the very least, the paper warned, the construction of the tunnel meant that "a design for the invasion of England and a general plan of the campaign will be subjects on which every cadet in a German military school will be invited to display his powers," and it suggested that in the circumstances the Channel had best be left untunneled. "Nature is on our side at present," the _Times_ concluded gravely, "and she will continue so if we will only suffer her. The silver streak is our safety." The author of a letter to the _Times_ printed in the same issue declared that the tunnel, if constructed, could be seized by the French from within as easily as from without, and that "in three hours a cavalry force might be sent through to seize the approaches at the English end."