Since my visit to the tunnel, the tendency of events has been to reinforce the brave hopes of Adams and his fellow pro-tunnelers. To be sure, while even the most dedicated of tunnel promoters may be prone to his black moments while pondering the nature and the effects of traditional British insularity—one of the most distinguished, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, the president of the Tunnel Study Group, a while ago observed with some touch of bitterness that it seemed as though "men may be flying to the moon before Britons can make a reasonable surface journey to Paris"—Britain's decision to seek full membership in the European Common Market, and the agreement of the French and British Governments to hold official talks on the construction of either a tunnel or a bridge across the Channel, have given the pro-tunnelers more solid reason for hope than perhaps has ever existed in the ranks of these visionaries in a century and a half. In the past, it was never possible for proponents of the tunnel to advance their cause with any success so long as their advocacy was not based on the prior existence of any profound change in Britain's traditional economic and strategic special and separate place in Europe, or of any change in the peculiar British sense of being an island people apart. But now such changes have taken place, or are in the process of taking place. Britain's strategic position has been profoundly altered by the advent of nuclear and rocket armaments. Her political and economic position has been as profoundly altered by the withering away of the British Empire and by the successful emergence of a new European commonwealth in the form of the Common Market. And the ancient British sense of being an island race apart seems to have been steadily eroded by a strange kind of rootlessness, partly arising out of Britain's altered place in the world, and as a general accompaniment of the intrusion of such uninsular influences as the jet airplane, commercial television, high-powered advertising, expense-account living, and the spread of installment buying. Notwithstanding all her misgivings on the subject of committing herself to abandonment of her ancient aloofness from the Continent, Britain can hardly ignore the implications of the relentless march of that process once described by the Duke of Wellington over a century ago in the heyday of the sailing ship, when he observed that Britain and the Continent were rapidly becoming joined by an "isthmus of steam."