At the end of the tunnel the action of the boring machine was briefly demonstrated, this time by special permission of the Board of Trade, and then the party was escorted out of the tunnel and taken to a good lunch, presumably at the Lord Warden Hotel. Another engraving in the same issue of _The Graphic_ shows members of the same party of officers, chairs drawn slightly back, sitting about a luncheon table. The monocled guests, ranged on each side of a clutter of bottles, potted ferns, place cards, and an interesting variety of glasses—including, as one can see fairly clearly, champagne glasses, claret glasses, and hock glasses—are being addressed by a bearded speaker. They look dazed. Yet while using his best softening-up techniques on the Army officers, Sir Edward did not let up his fire on his principal opponents among the military. Thus, during 1884, when he reintroduced his Tunnel Bill on the floor in Parliament (it was rejected by 222 votes to 84) he ridiculed the anti-tunnel generals for publicly confessing an inability to cope with defending a frontier "no bigger than the door of the House of Commons." Dealing with the question of British insularity, he also introduced the argument that since France and England had once been united as part of the same continental land mass his opponents, in refusing to unite them again, were openly showing distrust of the wisdom of Providence in having created the connection in the first place. This last assertion really incensed the editors of the London _Times_, who had been steadily invoking Providence as their ally against the tunnel all along. The _Times_ ran an editorial declaring angrily that no stronger reason could be found for distrusting the whole tunnel scheme than the fact that Sir Edward had been reduced to using such an argument. The _Times_ added, severely, "Ordinary people will probably be content to take the world as it appears in historic times. Everything that we possess and are—our character, our language, our freedom, our institutions, our religion, our unviolated hearths, and our far-extended Empire—we owe to the encircling sea; and when Englishmen try to penetrate the designs of Providence they will not seek them in geological speculations, but will rather thank Him Who 'isled us here.'"