Just before the First World War, the Channel Tunnel Company, headed by Baron Frederic Emile d'Erlanger's son, Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger, embarked on another crusade. In 1913, a deputation representing ninety M.P.s favorable to the tunnel scheme visited Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, to ask for the Government's approval for the scheme, and the Liberal London _Daily Chronicle_, editorially proclaiming that the advent of the airplane had put an end to England's position as an island, came through with a big pro-tunnel press campaign. However, the _Times_ of London continued to stick firmly to its ancient position, and it ran an editorial restating its old arguments against the tunnel and ingeniously adding a new one—that even if there were no real possibility of invasion, the very existence of the tunnel "might even itself lead to a precipitation of war, if in case of international complications it was considered necessary, in a possible moment of confusion, to close the tunnel at the Dover end." In July 1914, less than a fortnight before the outbreak of war, the Committee of Imperial Defense turned the tunnel scheme down again. But the value of a Channel tunnel as a supply route for the Allied armies on the Continent continued to be debated throughout the war, and when it was over Marshal Foch declared publicly that "If the English and the French had had a tunnel under the Channel in 1914, the war would have been shortened by at least two years." The Marshal was promptly made the honorary president of the Comité Français du Tunnel. In postwar England, the tunnel project began to obtain heavy support in Parliament. By 1924, some four hundred M.P.s—about two-thirds of the House—were said to be for it, and the new Labor Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, promised a careful and sympathetic review of the Government's position on the tunnel. He called all of the four living former Prime Ministers—Lord Balfour, Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George, and Stanley Baldwin—into consultation on the matter, as well as the Committee of Imperial Defense. The Prime Ministers met for forty minutes and rejected the scheme again, and MacDonald told Parliament that the Government felt postwar military developments had "tended, without exception, to render the Channel tunnel a more dangerous experiment" than ever. Winston Churchill protested the decision. "I do not hesitate to say that it was wrong," he told the House.