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: