The moment the Board of the Tunnel Company decided to obey you, I peremptorily ordered the works to be stopped. The [boring] machine has been silent since Thursday evening. But the Engineer sends me a very startling report and warning. He fears _defective ventilation_ [owing to stoppage of the air-driven boring machine] and danger to life—quite apart from depriving a fine body of skilled workmen of their bread, and general loss and damage in money. I can only reply to him that I am acting under your order. Still ... this is the first time the ventilation of a mine has been so interfered with. Should the engineer's alarm be well founded, and should men faint from bad air at the end of the gallery, there would be no means of getting them out alive. Sir Edward added, without changing his tone of humane agitation, that only the day before he had received a request from the Duke of Edinburgh to be allowed to see the tunnel workings, along with the Duchess, ten days hence, and that the Speaker of the House of Commons had already arranged to visit the tunnel "on Saturday, the 22nd, leaving Charing Cross at eleven." "What must be done?" he asked. Mr. Chamberlain replied promptly by telegraph that if the stopping of the machinery in the tunnel was constituting a danger to life, he authorized Sir Edward, pending further investigation of the situation by the Board of Trade, temporarily to keep the machinery going to the extent of preventing this danger. However, he followed up this telegram with a letter to Sir Edward in which he expressed himself as being "not able to understand the exact nature of the physical danger anticipated" by Sir Edward in the tunnel if the workings were stopped. "I do not see the necessity for workmen remaining in the tunnel where the ventilation is likely to be defective," Mr. Chamberlain observed. He added that he was making arrangements to have one of the Board of Trade inspectors visit the tunnel to investigate the situation. On April 11, the Board of Trade duly telegraphed Sir Edward that its chief inspector of railways, Colonel Yolland, of the Royal Engineers, would be at Dover at noon the next day to investigate the ventilation problem in the tunnel. Sir Edward, however, wired back that he was unable to meet the Colonel at Dover that day and could not make an appointment with him "until after the visit to the works of the Duke of Edinburgh on Tuesday next."