Its general tenor was set by General Spears's assertion that "the Channel saved us in 1940 and may well save us again," and that "The British people need no tunnels." And he asked, "Who would have believed that in the last war the Germans would not have destroyed the enormously important bridge over the Rhine at Remagen? But they failed to do so." To all such criticism as this, the Channel-tunnel people reacted not with the kind of broadsides that Sir Edward Watkin would have let loose in the heyday of the Channel-tunnel controversy but by hiring a public-relations outfit headed by a man called E. D. O'Brien, a former publicity director for the Conservative party, who is said to be known among his colleagues as Champagne Toby. O'Brien's champagne appears to be weaker stuff than Sir Edward Watkin's; the pro-tunnel publicity his outfit puts out seems to consist of things like a small booklet called "Channel Tunnel, the Facts," which an O'Brien assistant has described as "a sort of child's guide, in Q. and A. form, you know, about the tunnel." As soon as the British press fell on the promoters for making the demands they did for Government financial guarantees, the promoters came up with a set of counter-proposals. They offered to finance not only the tunnel itself but also the terminals and approaches on both sides; they further proposed leasing the tunnel directly to the two governments, thus avoiding the earlier requirement of governmental guarantee of the bonds. When the subject of constructing a Channel tunnel will come up for a decision one way or the other before the British Cabinet and Parliament again nobody seems willing to predict, and what the Cabinet will decide nobody seems willing to predict, either. However, D'Erlanger, who says that he would consider another tunnel thumbs down by the British Government or Parliament "a negation of progress," is always happy to talk about the benefits a Channel tunnel would confer upon Europe. "You have fifty million people on this side of the Channel and two hundred million plus on the Continental side. If you join them by a small hyphen, I think it _must_ facilitate trade on both sides," he says. "I like to think of the tunnel as a kind of engagement ring that would bind Britain's Outer Seven into a workable marriage with the six countries of the Common Market. Think of shipping goods from Rome to Birmingham or from Edinburgh to Bordeaux without breaking bulk, and at half the cost! It's high time Europe had a manifestation of progress along the lines of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and I think a Channel tunnel would be the great civil-engineering feat of the century for Europe."