(The French bridge advocates claim that they could reduce the winds buffeting traffic to a quarter of their intensity by installing deflectors on the sides of the traffic lanes; to this the tunnel advocates counter that boxing cars in traffic lanes for some twenty-one miles would create a psychological sense of confinement that drivers would find far more intimidating than riding on a train under the sea.) But the main objection to the bridge is its cost. It could only be built with the help of substantial government subsidies, and the experience of the pro-tunnelers is that such subsidies are almost impossible to obtain. Whatever the merits of the two schemes, they are certain to be considered in quite a different atmosphere now than they were back in the seventies, when, according to the observations that Sir Garnet Wolseley subsequently made to Sir Archibald Alison's scientific committee that investigated the tunnel question, "the tunnel scheme was ... looked upon as fanciful and unfeasible. It was not then regarded as having entered within the zone or scope of practical undertakings. No one believed that it would ever be made and, if mentioned, it always raised a smile, as does now any reference to flying machines as substitutes for railways." On August 28, 1961, things somehow seemed to come full circle when the London _Times_, which had started all the opposition in the press to the tunnel eighty years earlier, devoted a leading editorial to discussion of the subject of a fixed connection between France and Britain. The _Times_ started out in familiar fashion for a tunnel editorial by quoting from Shakespeare's "This royal throne" speech, but then it went on to concede in stately fashion that times had changed and that "Britain must soon decide whether to leap over the wall, to become a part of Europe." The _Times_ discussed the merits of the latest tunnel and bridge schemes in tones of expository reasonableness, without committing itself to either one scheme or the other, and without accusing the would-be moat-crossers, as of old, of flaunting the will of Providence. And the _Times_ wound up its editorial on a meaningful note by observing, in reference to the quotations with which the editorial had been prefaced, that while Shakespeare had the first words, John Donne deserved the last: "No man is an island, entire of itself." To which all the tunnel dreamers, after all their years of adversity in the face of the insular British character, reasonably can say Amen. About the Author