the difficult ventilation problems of a long road tunnel, would make for convenient transport of cars and trucks by a piggyback system. It further proposed that the tunnel be operated jointly by the British and French Government-run railways under a long lease from an international company yet to be formed, and that only the bare tunnel itself be privately financed, with the British and French state-run railways providing the installations, terminals, and rolling stock at a cost of some twenty million pounds. When D'Erlanger announced the Study Group's proposals, calling all the latest tunnel laborings "a last glorious effort to get this through," the British press received the news with big headlines on the front pages but with considerable indignation on its editorial pages. The core of the objections was not of a military nature but had to do with the number of financial concessions that the tunnel people were asking from the British and French Governments (that is, taxpayers) as a basis for going ahead with the scheme. The general attitude of the press was that the British Government should have nothing to do with some of the financial concessions asked. There were a good many references, all very familiar to a reader of the press attacks during the tunnel uproar back in the eighties, to "promoters," and the tone of editorial reaction was fairly well typified by a sarcastic article in _The Economist_ entitled "Pie Under the Sea." And the _Times_ ran an editorial declaring snappily that, as the proposals stood, "the light at the end of the tunnel would be either bright gold for the private owners of the £20 million of equity capital or Bright Red for the Anglo-French taxpayer." Then, shortly afterward, the tunnel came under public attack by Eoin C. Mekie, chairman of Silver City Airways, which in the years since the Second World War has ferried more than three hundred thousand cars and a million and a half passengers by air to and from the Continent. Mekie denounced the tunnel scheme as "commercial folly" and described it as "a feat of engineering which is already made obsolete by the speed of modern technical advances." Other attacks were made, too, from the enthusiasts over the future of Hovercraft, the heavier-than-air craft, still in the experimental stage, which ride on a cushion of air; and from, not unexpectedly, Channel shipping and ferry interests. Then Viscount Montgomery, in a newspaper interview, returned to the attack on the tunnel on the ground of its undermining what he called "our island strategy." He also observed in particular, when asked about the feasibility of blowing the tunnel up in case of war or threatened war, "The lessons of history show that things that ought to be blown up never are, as Guy Fawkes discovered." And Major-General Spears in the spring of 1960 gave fuller vent to his anti-tunnel views in a pamphlet that he wrote and had circulated privately.