All that the Study Group, which represents British, French and American commercial interests, needs to go ahead with the project and turn it into a reality is—besides money, and the Study Group seems to be confident that it can attract that—the approval of the British and French Governments of the scheme. For all practical purposes, the French Government never has had any objection to a fixed installation linking both sides of the Channel, and as far as the official British attitude is concerned, when the British Government announced, in July, 1961, that it would seek full membership in the European Common Market, most of the tunnel people felt sure that the forces of British insularity which had hindered the development of a tunnel for nearly a century at last had been dealt a blow to make them reel. But what raised the pro-tunnelers' excitement to the greatest pitch of all was the decision of the French and British Governments, last October, to hold discussions on the problem of building either a bridge or a tunnel. When these discussions got under way last November, the main question before the negotiators was the economic practicality of such a huge undertaking. Yet, with all the encouragement, few of the pro-tunnelers in England seem willing to make a flat prediction that the British Government will actively support the construction of a tunnel. They have been disappointed too often. Then again, despite the generally high hopes that this time the old strategic objections to the construction of a tunnel have been pretty well forgotten, pro-tunnelers are well aware that a number of Englishmen with vivid memories of 1940 are still doubtful about the project. "The Channel saved us last time, even in the age of the airplane, didn't it?" one English barrister said a while ago, in talking of his feelings about building the Channel tunnel. The tunnel project has the open enmity of Viscount Montgomery, who has made repeated attacks on it and who in 1960 demanded, in a newspaper interview, that before the Government took any stand on behalf of such a project, "The British people as a whole should be consulted and vote on the Channel tunnel as part of a General-Elections program." And, to show that the spirit of the anti-tunnelers has not lost its resilience, Major-General Sir Edward L. Spears, in the correspondence columns of the London _Times_ in April of that same year, denounced the latest Channel-tunnel scheme as "a plan which will not only cost millions of public money, but will let loose on to our inadequate roads eighteen hundred more vehicles an hour, each driven by a right-of-the-road driver in a machine whose steering wheel is on the left." [Illustration: Two]