Sir Edward, in his indomitable fashion, not only pursued his geological speculations but also kept pursuing the tunnel question in Parliament. In 1887, a year in which he changed the name of the Submarine Continental Railway Company to that of the Channel Tunnel Company (he had taken over the long-moribund rival company in 1886), he went on such a powerful campaign on behalf of a new Channel Tunnel Bill that it was defeated in the House by only seventy-six votes. In 1888, he tried again, and even managed to persuade Mr. Gladstone, now the leader of the Opposition, that the Channel could be tunneled under with propriety. As a result, Mr. Gladstone, in June 1888, gave his personal support to Sir Edward's Tunnel Bill and delivered a long Parliamentary speech on the subject. In this dissertation the venerable statesman, while taking nothing back about the wisdom of Providence in placing the Channel where it was, said he had now come to feel that a Channel tunnel could be used "without altering in any way our insular character or insular security, to give us some of the innocent and pacific advantages of a land frontier." But even Mr. Gladstone's support couldn't swing it. Parliament would not agree to the tunnel. At last, after all these setbacks, Sir Edward had to consider the tunnel project as a lost cause, if only temporarily. He stopped promoting it in 1894, having become involved in the meantime in a couple of alternate projects—a railway tunnel between Scotland and Ireland and a ship canal in Ireland between Dublin and Galway. Also, in 1889, he had become chairman of a company to erect at Wembley Park, near London, a great iron tower, modeled on the Eiffel Tower, which was to be known as the Watkin Tower. The Watkin Tower didn't get very high. Only a single stage was completed, and this was opened to the public in 1896; it was demolished eleven years later. Sir Edward Watkin died at Northenden, Cheshire, in 1901. [Illustration: Five]