When this report reached the Board of Trade, the department, outraged, made a motion before the High Court of Justice to cite the tunnel promoters for contempt. However, a cloud of doubt descended on the issue when the tunnel promoters claimed in court that Colonel Yolland's calculations were in error. The motion was put off with the promoters' promising to obey to the letter the demands of the Board of Trade. Later on in the month, Colonel Yolland, after making a further inspection, conceded that, owing to the difficulties of working in the tunnel, he had made some error of calculation. The true advance made in the tunnel since July 15, he said, was thirty-six yards—a figure he said was confirmed by the tunnel company's engineer. Colonel Yolland reported that the company engineers had installed a pump at the eastern end of the tunnel to force out the water accumulating there. He added, somewhat testily, "Of course men had to be employed in erecting this pump in the tunnel and in working it when it was ready, and as the boring machine has not been made use of for the purpose of cutting chalk, this ... conclusively proves what I had stated in my former reports, that it was not necessary to cut an inch of chalk for the purpose of ventilating and draining the tunnel." Altogether, and with all the difficulties they had encountered, the tunnel promoters had succeeded in boring the tunnel for a distance of 2,100 yards, or a little less than a mile and a quarter, toward France. The operations at the French end, which came to a stop in March of 1883, completed 2,009 yards of pilot tunnel from the bottom of the shaft by the cliffs at Sangatte. In the middle of August, the Government, having received all the reports from the War Office and the Board of Trade on the subject of the tunnel, caused the rival Channel-tunnel bills that had been brought before it to be set aside, and at the same time Mr. Chamberlain announced in the House of Commons that the Government had decided to propose, early the following year, the appointment of a Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons to dispose of the whole tunnel question as conclusively as possible. In the meantime, he announced the Government's intention of publishing a Blue Book containing all the principal documents and correspondence concerning the tunnel. The Blue Book was issued in October, and once again the wrath of the English press fell upon the tunnel project and its promoters. The tone of the press comment was most majestically represented by an editorial in the London _Times_, which had started off the press campaign against the project the year before. The _Times_ wrote that, unless it was much mistaken, "the publication of the Blue Book will be found to have closed the whole question of the Channel Tunnel for a long time to come."