This stupendous work is finished, and Wapping has reason to be proud of
such a truly wapping undertaking. Perhaps no enterprise ever had so much
cold water thrown upon it, and never was there a project which it seemed
at one time so difficult to go through with. The engineer has worked
like a horse, and has scarcely ever been out of the shaft.
The original shareholders, whose pockets were well drained, in fruitless
efforts to drain the tunnel, have now the satisfaction of once more
running through their property. For some time the ardour of the
projectors was damped by the works going on rather too swimmingly. When
accidents were every-day occurrences the Tunnel was a matter of
interest; but since the water has been effectually kept out, it has
become a dry subject.
On more than one occasion the Company would have been swamped, in spite
of all hands being put to the pumps, if Government had not lent their
sucker. The funds, in fact, were at low-water mark long before the works
reached the same desirable point; and the more the Tunnel was set afloat
the more were the shareholders aground in their undertaking.
But the perils are now past, and the Tunnel remains as a monument to
British enterprise. We should call it, perhaps, a pillar to the fame of
the engineer, if it were not that a pillar is incomplete without two
things, one of which—the shaft—has been taken away, while the
proprietors have long since lost sight of the capital.