Tunnel Sous La
Manche? Last week the dream of a 3,000-mile sub-Atlantic
railway seemed to grow ever so slightly less mad, as Britons and
Frenchmen got down again to dealing seriously with their
half-century-old project of driving a double-track tunnel under the
English Channel, 21 miles across. In London the French Ambassador,
popular M. Aimé Joseph de Fleuriau, officially declared at a dinner
tendered him in the House of Commons, “When the British Government
and the British Nation are ready to build the tunnel we will build it
with them. We very much desire to do so!”Historically it is of record
that the tunnel project, first officially embodied in the
Anglo-French protocol of May 3, 1875, has repeatedly been blocked by
British fear of a subaqueous invasion, and the Englishman’s jealous
love of his “splendid isolation.” Today however even the most
insularly minded are beginning to see that invasion from the skies is
the real danger and that a channel tunnel would be vastly
advantageous to British commerce in time of peace and easily
dynamitable in case of war with France. So pikestaff plain are the
advantages of a sub-Channel railway that last week even that ruddy,
insular, industrial squire, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, took up
sturdy cudgels in its defense. When the House of Commons reassembled
last week after a month-long holiday, the Squire-Statesman said: “In view of the present wide public interest in the tunnel
project the government has come to the conclusion that the time is
ripe for a comprehensive reexamination of the question. We are
anxious that a very thorough consideration should be made of the
economic aspects of the matter in order that these may be weighed with
imperial defence considerations and a decision reached on broad grounds
of national policy.”
