Anglo-American Establishment

who have laboured most enduringly at the fabric of Empire were not getters of wealth

and plunderers of spoil. It was due to their strength of character and moral purpose that

British rule in India and Egypt has become the embodiment of order and justice.... Duty

is an abstract term, but the facts it signifies are the most concrete and real in our

experience. The essential thing is to grasp its meaning as a motive power in men s lives.

[This was probably from Kerr, but could have been Toynbee or Milner speaking. The

writer continued:] The end of the State is to make men, and its strength is measured not in

terms of defensive armaments or economic prosperity but by the moral personality of its

citizens.... The function of the State is positive and ethical, to secure for its individual

members that they shall not merely live but live well. Social reformers are prone to insist

too strongly on an ideal of material comfort for the people.... A life of satisfaction

depends not on higher wages or lower prices or on leisure for recreation, but on work that

calls into play the higher capacities of man's nature.... The cry of the masses should be

not for wages or comforts or even liberty, but for opportunities for enterprise and

responsibility. A policy for closer union in the Empire is full of significance in relation to

this demand.... There is but one way of promise. It is that the peoples of the Empire shall

realize their national unity and draw from that ideal an inspiration to common endeavour

in the fulfillment of the moral obligations which their membership of the Empire entails.

The recognition of common Imperial interests is bound to broaden both their basis of

public action and their whole view of life. Public life is ennobled by great causes and by

these alone.... Political corruption, place-hunting, and party intrigue have their natural

home in small communities where attention is concentrated upon local interests. Great

public causes call into being the intellectual and moral potentialities of people.... The

phrases "national character," "national will," and "national personality" are no empty catchwords. Everyone knows that esprit de corps is not a fiction but a reality; that the

spirit animating a college or a regiment is something that cannot be measured in terms of

the private contributions of the individual members.... The people of the Empire are face

to face with a unique and an historic opportunity! It is their mission to base the policy of

a Great Empire on the foundations of freedom and law.... It remains for them to crown

the structure by the institution of a political union that shall give solidarity to the Empire

as a whole. Duty and the logic of facts alike point this goal of their endeavour.”

In this article can be found, at least implicitly, all the basic ideas of the Milner Group:

their suspicion of party politics; their emphasis on moral qualities and the cement of

common outlook for linking people together; their conviction that the British Empire is

the supreme moral achievement of man, but an achievement yet incomplete and still

unfolding; their idea that the highest moral goals are the development of personality

through devotion to duty and service under freedom and law; their neglect, even scorn,

for economic considerations; and their feeling for the urgent need to persuade others to

accept their point of view in order to allow the Empire to achieve the destiny for which

they yearn.

The Milner Group is a standing refutation of the Marxist or Leninist interpretations of

history or of imperialism. Its members were motivated only slightly by materialistic

incentives, and their imperialism was motivated not at all by the desire to preserve or

extend capitalism. On the contrary their economic ideology, in the early stages at least,

was more socialistic than Manchester in its orientation. To be sure, it was an

undemocratic kind of socialism, which was willing to make many sacrifices to the well-

being of the masses of the people but reluctant to share with these masses political power

that might allow them to seek their own well-being. This socialistic leaning was more

evident in the earlier (or Balliol) period than in the later (or New College) period, and

disappeared almost completely when Lothian and Brand replaced Esher, Grey, and

Milner at the center of the Group. Esher regarded the destruction of the middle class as

inevitable and felt that the future belonged to the workers and an administrative state. He

dedicated his book After the War (1919) to Robert Smillie, President of the Miners'

Federation, and wrote him a long letter on 5 May 1919. On 12 September of the same

year, he wrote to his son, the present Viscount Esher: "There are things that cannot be

confiscated by the Smillies and Sidney Webbs. These seem to me the real objectives."

Even earlier, Arnold Toynbee was a socialist of sorts and highly critical of the current

ideology of liberal capitalism as proclaimed by the high priests of the Manchester School.

Milner gave six lectures on socialism in Whitechapel in 1882 (published in 1931 in The

National Review). Both Toynbee and Milner worked intermittently at social service of a

mildly socialistic kind, an effort that resulted in the founding of Toynbee Hall as a

settlement house in 1884. As chairman of the board of Internal Revenue in 1892-1897,

Milner drew up Sir William Harcourt's budget, which inaugurated the inheritance tax. In

South Africa he was never moved by capitalistic motives, placing a heavy profits tax on

the output of the Rand mines to finance social improvements, and considering with

objective calm the question of nationalizing the railroads or even the mines. Both

Toynbee and Milner were early suspicious of the virtues of free trade—not, however,

because tariffs could provide high profits for industrial concerns but because tariffs and

imperial preference could link the Empire more closely into economic unity. In his later

years, Milner became increasingly radical, a development that did not fit any too well

with the conservative financial outlook of Brand, or even Hichens. As revealed in his

book Questions of the Hour (1923), Milner was a combination of technocrat and guild

socialist and objected vigorously to the orthodox financial policy of deflation, balanced

budget, gold standard, and free international exchange advocated by the Group after

1918. This orthodox policy, inspired by Brand and accepted by The Round Table after

1918, was regarded by Milner as an invitation to depression, unemployment, and the

dissipation of Britain's material and moral resources. On this point there can be no doubt

that Milner was correct. Not himself a trained economist, Milner, nevertheless, saw that

the real problems were of a technical and material nature and that Britain's ability to

produce goods should be limited only by the real supply of knowledge, labor, energy, and

materials and not by the artificial limitations of a deliberately restricted supply of money

and credit. This point of view of Milner's was not accepted by the Group until after 1931,

and not as completely as by Milner even then. The point of view of the Group, at least in

the period 1918-1931, was the point of view of the international bankers with whom

Brand, Hichens, and others were so closely connected. This point of view, which

believed that Britain's prewar financial supremacy could be restored merely by

reestablishing the prewar financial system, with the pound sterling at its prewar parity,

failed completely to see the changed conditions that made all efforts to restore the prewar

system impossible. The Group's point of view is clearly revealed in The Round Table

articles of the period. In the issue of December 1918, Brand advocated the financial

policy which the British government followed, with such disastrous results, for the next

thirteen years. He wrote:

“That nation will recover quickest after the war which corrects soonest any

depreciation in currency, reduces by production and saving its inflated credit, brings

down its level of prices, and restores the free import and export of gold.... With all our

wealth of financial knowledge and experience behind us it should be easy for us to steer

the right path—though it will not be always a pleasant one—amongst the dangers of the

future. Every consideration leads to the view that the restoration of the gold standard—

whether or not it can be achieved quickly—should be our aim. Only by that means can

we be secure that our level of prices shall be as low as or lower than prices in other

countries, and on that condition depends the recovery of our export trade and the

prevention of excessive imports. Only by that means can we provide against and abolish

the depreciation of our currency which, though the [existing] prohibition against dealings

in gold prevents our measuring it, almost certainly exists, and safeguard ourself against

excessive grants of credit.”

He then outlined a detailed program to contract credit, curtail government spending,

raise taxes, curtail imports, increase exports, etc. (15) Hichens, who, as an industrialist

rather than a banker, was not nearly so conservative in financial matters as Brand,

suggested that the huge public debt of 1919 be met by a capital levy, but, when Brand's

policies were adopted by the government, Hichens went along with them and sought a

way out for his own business by reducing costs by "rationalization of production."

These differences of opinion on economic matters within the Group did not disrupt the

Group, because it was founded on political rather than economic ideas and its roots were

to be found in ancient Athens rather than in modern Manchester. The Balliol generation,

from Jowett and Nettleship, and the New College generation, from Zimmern, obtained an

idealistic picture of classical Greece which left them nostalgic for the fifth century of

Hellenism and drove them to seek to reestablish that ancient fellowship of intellect and

patriotism in modern Britain. The funeral oration of Pericles became their political

covenant with destiny, Duty to the state and loyalty to one's fellow citizens became the

chief values of life. But, realizing that the jewel of Hellenism was destroyed by its

inability to organize any political unit larger than a single city, the Milner Group saw the

necessity of political organization in order to insure the continued existence of freedom

and higher ethical values and hoped to be able to preserve the values of their day by

organizing the whole world around the British Empire.

Curtis puts this quite clearly in The Commonwealth of Nations (1916), where he says:

“States, whether autocracies or commonwealths, ultimately rest on duty, not on self-

interest or force.... The quickening principle of a state is a sense of devotion, an adequate

recognition somewhere in the minds of its subjects that their own interests are

subordinate to those of the state. The bond which unites them and constitutes them

collectively as a state is, to use the words of Lincoln, in the nature of dedication. Its

validity, like that of the marriage tie, is at root not contractual but sacramental. Its

foundation is not self-interest, but rather some sense of obligation, however conceived,

which is strong enough to over-master self-interest.” (16)

History for this Group, and especially for Curtis, presented itself as an age-long

struggle between the principles of autocracy and the principles of commonwealth,

between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, between Asiatic theocracy and

European freedom. This view of history, founded on the work of Zimmern, E. A.

Freeman, Lord Bryce, and A. V. Dicey, felt that the distinguishing mark between the two

hosts could be found in their views of law—the forces of light regarding law as manmade

and mutable, but yet above all men, while the forces of darkness regarded law as divine

and eternal, yet subordinate to the king. The one permitted diversity, growth, and

freedom, while the other engendered monotony, stultification, and slavery. The struggle

between the two had gone on for thousands of years, spawning such offspring as the

Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, and the struggles of Britain with the forces of Philip II, of

Louis XIV, of Napoleon, and of Wilhelm II. Thus, to this Group, Britain stood as the

defender of all that was fine or civilized in the modern world, just as Athens had stood for

the same values in the ancient world. (17) Britain's mission, under this interpretation, was

to carry freedom and light (that is, the principles of commonwealth) against the forces of

theocracy and darkness (that is, autocracy) in Asia—and even in Central Europe. For this

Group regarded the failure of France or Germany to utilize the English idea of

"supremacy of law" (as described by Dicey in his The Law of the Constitution, 1885) as

proof that these countries were still immersed, at least partially, in the darkness of

theocratic law. The slow spread of English political institutions to Europe as well as Asia

in the period before the First World War was regarded by the Group as proof both of their

superiority and of the possibility of progress. In Asia and Africa, at least, England's

civilizing mission was to be carried out by force, if necessary, for "the function of force is

to give moral ideas time to take root." Asia thus could be compelled to accept

civilization, a procedure justifiable to the Group on the grounds that Asians are obviously

better off under European rule than under the rule of fellow Asians and, if consulted,

would clearly prefer British rule to that of any other European power. To be sure, the

blessings to be extended to the less fortunate peoples of the world did not include

democracy. To Milner, to Curtis, and apparently to most members of the Group,

democracy was not an unmixed good, or even a good, and far inferior to rule by the best,

or, as Curtis says, by those who "have some intellectual capacity for judging the public

interest, and, what is no less important, some moral capacity for treating it as paramount

to their own."

This disdain for unrestricted democracy was quite in accordance with the ideas

revealed by Milner's activities in South Africa and with the Greek ideals absorbed at

Balliol or New College. However, the restrictions on democracy accepted by the Milner

Group were of a temporary character, based on the lack of education and background of

those who were excluded from political participation. It was not a question of blood or

birth, for these men were not racists.

This last point is important because of the widespread misconception that these people

were racially intolerant. They never were; certainly those of the inner circle never were.

On the contrary, they were ardent advocates of a policy of education and uplift of all

groups, so that ultimately all groups could share in political life and in the rich benefits of

the British way of life. To be sure, the members of the Group did not advocate the

immediate extension of democracy and self-government to all peoples within the Empire,

but these restrictions were based not on color of skin or birth but upon cultural outlook

and educational background. Even Rhodes, who is widely regarded as a racist because his

scholarships were restricted to candidates from the Nordic countries, was not a racist. He

restricted his scholarships to these countries because he felt that they had a background

sufficiently homogeneous to allow the hope that educational interchange could link them

together to form the core of the worldwide system which he hoped would ultimately

come into existence. Beyond this, Rhodes insisted that there must be no restrictions

placed on the scholarships on a basis of race, religion, skin color, or national origin.(18)

In his own life, Rhodes cared nothing about these things. Some of his closest friends were

Jews (like Beit), and in three of his wills he left Lord Rothschild as his trustee, in one as

his sole trustee. Milner and the other members felt similarly. Lionel Curtis, in his

writings, makes perfectly clear both his conviction that character is acquired by training

rather than innate ability and his insistence on tolerance in personal contact between

members of different races. In his The Commonwealth of Nations (1916) he says:

"English success in planting North America and the comparative failure of their rivals

must, in fact, be traced to the respective merits not of breed but of institutions"; and

again: "The energy and intelligence which had saved Hellas [in the Persian Wars] was the

product of her free institutions." In another work he protests against English mistreatment

of natives in India and states emphatically that it must be ended. He says: "The conduct

on the part of Europeans . . . is more than anything else the root cause of Indian unrest . . .

I am strongly of opinion that governors should be vested with powers to investigate

judicially cases where Europeans are alleged to have outraged Indian feelings. Wherever

a case of wanton and unprovoked insult such as those I have cited is proved, government

should have the power to order the culprit to leave the country.... A few deportations

would soon effect a definite change for the better."(19) That Dove felt similarly is clear

from his letters to Brand.

Without a belief in racism, it was perfectly possible for this Group to believe, as they

did, in the ultimate extension of freedom and self-government to all parts of the Empire.

To be sure, they believed that this was a path to be followed slowly, but their reluctance

was measured by the inability of "backward" peoples to understand the principles of a

commonwealth, not by reluctance to extend to them either democracy or self-

government.

Curtis defined the distinction between a commonwealth and a despotism in the

following terms: "The rule of law as contrasted with the rule of an individual is the

distinguishing mark of a commonwealth. In despotism government rests on the authority

of the ruler or of the invisible and uncontrollable power behind him. In a commonwealth

rulers derive their authority from the law and the law from a public opinion which is

competent to change it." Accordingly, "the institutions of a commonwealth cannot be

successfully worked by peoples whose ideas are still those of a theocratic or patriarchal

society. The premature extension of representative institutions throughout the Empire

would be the shortest road to anarchy."(20) The people must first be trained to understand

and practice the chief principles of commonwealth, namely the supremacy of law and the

subjection of the motives of self-interest and material gain to the sense of duty to the

interests of the community as a whole. Curtis felt that such an educational process was

not only morally necessary on the part of Britain but was a practical necessity, since the

British could not expect to keep 430 million persons in subjection forever but must rather

hope to educate them up to a level where they could appreciate and cherish British ideals.

In one book he says: "The idea that the principle of the commonwealth implies universal

suffrage betrays an ignorance of its real nature. That principle simply means that

government rests on the duty of the citizens to each other, and is to be vested in those

who are capable of setting public interest before their own." (21) In another work he says:

"As sure as day follows the night, the time will come when they [the Dominions] will

have to assume the burden of the whole of their affairs. For men who are fit for it, self-

government is a question not of privilege but rather of obligation. It is duty, not interest,

which impels men to freedom, and duty, not interest, is the factor which turns the scale in

human affairs." India is included in this evolutionary process, for Curtis wrote: " A

despotic government might long have closed India to Western ideas. But a

commonwealth is a living thing. It cannot suffer any part of itself to remain inert. To live

it must move, and move in every limb.... Under British rule Western ideas will continue

to penetrate and disturb Oriental society, and whether the new spirit ends in anarchy or

leads to the establishment of a higher order depends upon how far the millions of India

can be raised to a fuller and more rational conception of the ultimate foundations upon

which the duty of obedience to government rests."

These ideas were not Curtis's own, although he was perhaps the most prolific, most

eloquent, and most intense in his feelings. They were apparently shared by the whole

inner circle of the Group. Dove, writing to Brand from India in 1919, is favorable to

reform and says: "Lionel is right. You can't dam a world current. There is, I am

convinced, 'purpose' under such things. All that we can do is to try to turn the flood into

the best channel." In the same letter he said: "Unity will, in the end, have to be got in

some other way.... Love—call it, if you like, by a longer name—is the only thing that can

make our post-war world go round, and it has, I believe, something to say here too. The

future of the Empire seems to me to depend on how far we are able to recognize this. Our

trouble is that we start some way behind scratch. Indians must always find it hard to

understand us." And the future Lord Lothian, ordering an article on India for The Round

Table from a representative in India, wrote: "We want an article in The Round Table and

I suggest to you that the main conclusion which the reader should draw from it should be

that the responsibility rests upon him of seeing that the Indian demands are

sympathetically handled without delay after the war."(22)

What this Group feared was that the British Empire would fail to profit from the

lessons they had discerned in the Athenian empire or in the American Revolution.

Zimmern had pointed out to them the sharp contrast between the high idealism of

Pericles's funeral oration and the crass tyranny of the Athenian empire. They feared that

the British Empire might fall into the same difficulty and destroy British idealism and

British liberties by the tyranny necessary to hold on to a reluctant Empire. And any effort

to hold an empire by tyranny they regarded as doomed to failure. Britain would be

destroyed, as Athens was destroyed, by powers more tyrannical than herself. And, still

drawing parallels with ancient Greece, the Group feared that all culture and civilization

would go down to destruction because of our inability to construct some kind of political

unit larger than the national state, just as Greek culture and civilization in the fourth

century B.C. went down to destruction because of the Greeks’ inability to construct some

kind of political unit larger than the city-state. This was the fear that had animated

Rhodes, and it was the same fear that was driving the Milner Group to transform the

British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations and then place that system within a

League of Nations. In 1917, Curtis wrote in his Letter to the People of India: "The world

is in throes which precede creation or death. Our whole race has outgrown the merely

national state, and as surely as day follows night or night the day, will pass either to a

Commonwealth of Nations or else an empire of slaves. And the issue of these agonies

rests with us."

At the same time the example of the American Revolution showed the Group the

dangers of trying to rule the Empire from London: to tax without representation could

only lead to disruption. Yet it was no longer possible that 45 million in the United

Kingdom could tax themselves for the defense of 435 million in the British Empire.

What, then, was the solution? The Milner Group's efforts to answer this question led

eventually, as we shall see in Chapter 8, to the present Commonwealth of Nations, but

before we leave The Round Table, a few words should be said about Lord Milner's

personal connection with the Round Table Group and the Group's other connections in

the field of journalism and publicity.

Milner was the creator of the Round Table Group (since this is but another name for

the Kindergarten) and remained in close personal contact with it for the rest of his life. In

the sketch of Milner in the Dictionary of National Biography, written by Basil Williams

of the Kindergarten, we read: "He was always ready to discuss national questions on a

non-party basis, joining with former members of his South African 'Kindergarten' in their

'moot,' from which originated the political review, The Round Table, and in a more

heterogeneous society, the 'Coefficients,' where he discussed social and imperial

problems with such curiously assorted members as L. S. Amery, H. G. Wells, (Lord)

Haldane, Sir Edward Grey, (Sir) Michael Sadler, Bernard Shaw, J. L. Garvin, William

Pember Reeves, and W. A. S. Hewins." In the obituary of Hichens, as already indicated,

we find in reference to the Round Table the sentence: "Often at its head sat the old

masters of the Kindergarten, Lord Milner and his successor, Lord Selborne, close friends

and allies of Hichens to the end." And in the obituary of Lord Milner in The Round Table

for June 1925, we find the following significant passage:

“The founders and the editors of The Round Table mourn in a very special sense the

death of Lord Milner. For with him they have lost not only a much beloved friend, but

one whom they have always regarded as their leader. Most of them had the great good

fortune to serve under him in South Africa during or after the South African war, and to

learn at firsthand from him something of the great ideals which inspired him. From those

days at the very beginning of this century right up to the present time, through the days of

Crown Colony Government in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, of the making of the

South African constitution, and through all the varied and momentous history of the

British Empire in the succeeding fifteen years, they have had the advantage of Lord

Milner's counsel and guidance, and they are grateful to think that, though at times he

disagreed with them, he never ceased to regard himself as the leader to whom, above

everyone else, they looked. It is of melancholy interest to recall that Lord Milner had

undertaken to come on May 13, the very day of his death, to a meeting specially to

discuss with them South African problems.”

The Round Table was published during the Second World War from Rhodes House,

Oxford, which is but one more indication of the way in which the various instruments of

the Milner Group are able to cooperate with one another.

The Times and The Round Table are not the only publications which have been

controlled by the Milner Group. At various times in the past, the Group has been very

influential on the staffs of the Quarterly Review, The Nineteenth Century and After, The

Economist, and the Spectator. Anyone familiar with these publications will realize that

most of them, for most of the time, have been quite secretive as to the names of the

members of their staffs or even as to the names of their editors. The extent of the Milner

Group's influence and the periods during which it was active cannot be examined here.

The Milner Group was also very influential in an editorial fashion in regard to a series

of excellent and moderately priced volumes known as The Home University Library.

Any glance at the complete list of volumes in this series will reveal that a large number of

the names are those of persons mentioned in this study. The influence of the Group on

The Home University Library was chiefly exercised through H. A. L.

Fisher, a member of the inner circle of the Group, but the influence, apparently, has

survived his death in 1940.

The Milner Group also attempted, at the beginning at least, to use Milner's old

connections with adult education and working-class schools (a connection derived from

Toynbee and Samuel Barnett) to propagate its imperial doctrines. As A. L. Smith, the

Master of Balliol, put it in 1915, "We must educate our masters." In this connection,

several members of the Round Table Group played an active role in the Oxford Summer

School for Working Class Students in 1913. This was so successful (especially a lecture

on the Empire by Curtis) that a two-week conference was held early in the summer of

1914, "addressed by members of the Round Table Group, and others, on Imperial and

Foreign Problems" (to quote A. L. Smith again). As a result, a plan was drawn up on 30

July 1914 to present similar programs in the 110 tutorial classes existing in industrial

centers. The outbreak of war prevented most of this program from being carried out.

After the war ended, the propaganda work among the British working classes became less

important, for various reasons, of which the chief were that working-class ears were

increasingly monopolized by Labour Party speakers and that the Round Table Group

were busy with other problems like the League of Nations, Ireland, and the United

States.(23)

Chapter 8—War and Peace, 1915-1920

The Milner Group was out of power for a decade from 1906 to 1915. We have already

indicated our grounds for believing that this condition was not regarded with distaste,

since its members were engaged in important activities of their own and approved of the

conduct of foreign policy (their chief field of interest) by the Liberal Party under Asquith,

Grey, and Haldane. During this period came the Union of South Africa, The Morley-

Minto reforms, the naval race with Germany, the military conversations with France, the

agreement of 1907 with Russia, the British attitude against Germany in the Agadir crisis

(a crisis to whose creation The Times had contributed no little material)—in fact, a whole

series of events in which the point of view of the Milner Group was carried out just as if

they were in office. To be sure, in domestic matters such as the budget dispute and the

ensuing House of Lords dispute, and in the question of Home Rule for Ireland, the Milner

Group did not regard the Liberal achievements with complete satisfaction, but in none of

these were the members of the Milner Group diehards (as members of the Cecil Bloc

sometimes were). (1) But with the outbreak of war, the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc

wanted to come to power and wanted it badly, chiefly because control of the government

in wartime would make it possible to direct events toward the postwar settlement which

the Group envisaged. The Group also believed that the war could be used by them to

fasten on Britain the illiberal economic regulation of which they had been dreaming since

Chamberlain resigned in 1903 (at least).

The Group got to power in 1916 by a method which they repeated with the Labour

Party in 1931. By a secret intrigue with a parvenu leader of the government, the Group

offered to make him head of a new government if he would split his own party and

become Prime Minister, supported by the Group and whatever members he could split off

from his own party. The chief difference between 1916 and 1931 is that in the former

year the minority that was being betrayed was the Group's own social class—in fact, the

Liberal Party members of the Cecil Bloc. Another difference is that in 1916 the plot

worked—the Liberal Party was split and permanently destroyed— while in 1931 the

plotters broke off only a fragment of the Labour Party and damaged it only temporarily

(for fourteen years). This last difference, however, was not caused by any lack of skill in

carrying out the intrigue but by the sociological differences between the Liberal Party and

the Labour Party in the twentieth century. The latter was riding the wave of the future,

while the former was merely one of two "teams" put on the field by the same school for

an intramural game, and, as such, it was bound to fuse with its temporary antagonist as

soon as the future produced an extramural challenger. This strange (to an outsider) point

of view will explain why Asquith had no real animosity for Bonar Law or Balfour (who

really betrayed him) but devoted the rest of his life to belittling the actions of Lloyd

George. Asquith talked later about how he was deceived (and even lied to) in December

1915, but never made any personal attack on Bonar Law, who did the prevaricating (if

any). The actions of Bonar Law were acceptable in the code of British politics, a code

largely constructed on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow, but Lloyd George's actions,

which were considerably less deliberate and cold-blooded, were quite unforgivable,

coming as they did from a parvenu who had been built up to a high place in the Liberal

Party because of his undeniable personal ability, but who, nonetheless, was an outsider

who had never been near the playing fields of Eton.

In the coalition governments of May 1915 and December 1916, members of the Cecil

Bloc took the more obvious positions (as befitted their seniority), while members of the

Milner Group took the less conspicuous places, but by 1918 the latter group had the

whole situation tied up in a neat package and held all the strings.

In the first coalition (May 1915), Lansdowne came into the Cabinet without portfolio,

Curzon as Lord Privy Seal, Bonar Law at the Colonial Office, Austen Chamberlain at the

India Office, Balfour at the Admiralty, Selborne as President of the Board of Agriculture,

Walter Long as President of the Local Government Board, Sir Edward Carson as

Attorney General, F. E. Smith as Solicitor General, Lord Robert Cecil as Under Secretary

in the Foreign Office, and Arthur Steel-Maitland as Under Secretary in the Colonial

Office. Of these eleven names, at least nine were members of the Cecil Bloc, and four

were close to the Milner Group (Cecil, Balfour, Steel-Maitland, and Selborne).

In the second coalition government (December 1916), Milner was Minister without

Portfolio; Curzon was Lord President of the Council; Bonar Law, Chancellor of the

Exchequer; Sir Robert Finlay, Lord Chancellor; the Earl of Crawford, Lord Privy Seal;

Sir George Cave, Home Secretary; Arthur Balfour, Foreign Secretary; The Earl of Derby,

War Secretary; Walter Long, Colonial Secretary; Austen Chamberlain, at the India

Office; Sir Edward Carson, First Lord of the Admiralty; Henry E. Duke, Chief Secretary

for Ireland; H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education; R. E. Prothero,

President of the Board of Agriculture; Sir Albert Stanley, President of the Board of

Trade; F. E. Smith, Attorney General; Robert Cecil, Minister of Blockade; Lord

Hardinge, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs; Steel-Maitland, Under Secretary for the

Colonies; and Lord Wolmer (son of Lord Selborne), assistant director of the War Trade

Department. Of these twenty names, eleven, at least, were members of the Cecil Bloc,

and four or five were members of the Milner Group.

Milner himself became the second most important figure in the government (after

Lloyd George), especially while he was Minister without Portfolio. He was chiefly

interested in food policy, war trade regulations, and postwar settlements. He was

chairman of a committee to increase home production of food (1915) and of a committee

on postwar reconstruction (1916). From the former came the food-growing policy

adopted in 1917, and from the latter came the Ministry of Health set up in 1919. In 1917

he went with Lloyd George to a meeting of the Allied War Council in Rome and from

there on a mission to Russia. He went to France after the German victories in March

1918, and was the principal influence in the appointment of Foch as Supreme

Commander in the west. In April he became Secretary of State for War, and, after the

election of December 1918, became Colonial Secretary. He was one of the signers of the

Treaty of Versailles. Of Milner's role at this time, John Buchan wrote in his memoirs: "In

the Great War from 1916 to 1918, he was the executant of the War Cabinet who

separated the sense from the nonsense in the deliberations of that body, and was

responsible for its chief practical achievements. To him were largely due the fruitful

things which emerged from the struggle, the new status of the Dominions, and the notable

advances in British social policy." In all of these actions Milner remained as unobtrusive

as possible. Throughout this period Milner's opinion of Lloyd George was on the highest

level. Writing twenty years later in The Commonwealth of God, Lionel Curtis recorded

two occasions in which Milner praised Lloyd George in the highest terms. On one of

these he called him a greater war leader than Chatham.

At this period it was not always possible to distinguish between the Cecil Bloc and the

Milner Group, but it is notable that the members of the former who were later clearly

members of the latter were generally in the fields in which Milner was most interested. In

general, Milner and his Group dominated Lloyd George during the period from 1917 to

1921. As Prime Minister, Lloyd George had three members of the Group as his

secretaries (P. H. Kerr, 1916-1922; W. G. S. Adams, 1916-1919; E. W. M. Grigg, 1921-

1922) and Waldorf Astor as his parliamentary secretary (1917-1918). The chief decisions

were made by the War Cabinet and Imperial War Cabinet, whose membership merged

and fluctuated but in 1917-1918 consisted of Lloyd George, Milner, Curzon, and

Smuts—that is, two members of the Milner Group, one of the Cecil Bloc, with the Prime

Minister himself. The secretary to these groups was Maurice Hankey (later a member of

the Milner Group), and the editor of the published reports of the War Cabinet was W. G.

S. Adams. Amery was assistant secretary, while Meston was a member of the Imperial

War Cabinet in 1917. Frederick Liddell (Fellow of All Souls) was made First

Parliamentary Counsel in 1917 and held the position for eleven years, following this post

with a fifteen-year period of service as counsel to the Speaker (1928-1943).(2)

Within the various government departments a somewhat similar situation prevailed.

The Foreign Office in its topmost ranks was held by the Cecil Bloc, with Balfour as

Secretary of State (1916-1919), followed by Curzon (1919-1924). When Balfour went to

the United States on a mission in 1917, he took along Ian Malcolm (brother-in-law of

Dougal Malcolm). Malcolm was later Balfour's private secretary at the Peace Conference

in 1919. In Washington, Balfour had as deputy chairman to the mission R. H. Brand. In

London, as we have seen, Robert Cecil was Parliamentary Under Secretary and later

Assistant Secretary. In the Political Intelligence Department, Alfred Zimmern was the

chief figure. G. W. Prothero was director of the Historical Section and was, like Cecil and

Zimmern, chiefly concerned with the future peace settlement. He was succeeded by J. W.

Headlam-Morley, who held the post of historical adviser from 1920 to his death in 1928.

All of these persons were members of the Cecil Bloc or Milner Group.

In the India Office we need mention only a few names, as this subject will receive a

closer scrutiny later. Austen Chamberlain was Secretary of State in 1915-1917 and gave

the original impetus toward the famous act of 1919. Sir Frederick Duke (a member of the

Round Table Group, whom we shall mention later) was chief adviser to Chamberlain's

successor, E. S. Montagu, and became Permanent Under Secretary in 1920. Sir Malcolm

Seton (also a member of the Round Table Group from 1913 onward) was Assistant Under

Secretary (1919-1924) and later Deputy Under Secretary.

In blockade and shipping, Robert Cecil was Minister of Blockade (1916-1918), while

Reginald Sothern Holland organized the attack on German trade in the earlier period

(1914). M. L. Gwyer was legal adviser to the Ministry of Shipping during the war and to

the Ministry of Health after the war (1917-1926), while J. Arthur Salter (later a

contributor to The Round Table and a Fellow of All Souls for almost twenty years) was

director of ship requisitioning in 1917 and later secretary to the Allied Maritime

Transport Council and chairman of the Allied Maritime Transport Executive (1918).

After the war he was a member of the Supreme Economic Council and general secretary

to the Reparations Commission (1919-1922).

A. H. D. R. Steel-Maitland was head of the War Trade Department in 1917-1919,

while Lord Wolmer (son of Lord Selborne and grandson of Lord Salisbury) was assistant

director in 1916-1918. Henry Birchenough was a member or chairman of several

committees dealing with related matters. R. S. Rait was a member of the department from

its creation in 1915 to the end of the war; H. W. C. Davis was a member in 1915 and a

member of the newly created War Trade Advisory Committee thereafter. Harold Butler

was secretary to the Foreign Trade Department of the Foreign Office (1916-1917). H. D.

Henderson (who has been a Fellow of All Souls since 1934) was secretary of the Cotton

Control Board (1917-1919).

The Board of Agriculture was dominated by members of the Cecil Bloc and Milner

Group. Lord Selborne was President of the board in 1915-1916, and Prothero (Lord

Ernle) in 1916-1919. Milner and Selborne were chairmen of the two important

committees of the board in 1915 and 1916. These sought to establish as a war measure

(and ultimately as a postwar measure also) government-guaranteed prices for agricultural

products at so high a level that domestic production of adequate supplies would be

insured. This had been advocated by Milner for many years but was not obtained on a

permanent basis until after 1930, although used on a temporary basis in 1917-1919. The

membership of these committees was largely made up of members of the Cecil Bloc. The

second Viscount Goschen (son of Milner's old friend and grandfather-in-law of Milner's

step-grandson) was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board; Lord Astor was chairman of a

dependent committee on milk supplies; Sothern Holland was controller of the Cultivation

Department within the Food Production Department of the board (1918); Mrs. Alfred

Lyttelton was deputy director of the Women's Branch; Lady Alicia Cecil was assistant

director of horticulture in the Food Production Department; and Edward Strutt (brother-

in-law of Balfour), who had been a member of both the Milner and Selborne Committees,

was technical adviser to Prothero during his term as President and was the draftsman of

the Corn Production Act of 1917. He later acted as one of Milner's assistants in the effort

to establish a tariff in 1923. His sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was

written by his nephew (and Balfour's nephew) Lord Rayleigh.

In the Colonial Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918-1921; George Fiddes (of

the Milner Kindergarten) was Permanent Under Secretary in 1916-1921; Steel-Maitland

was Parliamentary Under Secretary in 1915-1917; while Amery was in the same position

in 1919-1921.

In intelligence and public information, we find John Buchan as head of the

Information Department of the War Office, with John Dove and B. H. Sumner (the

present Warden of All Souls) in military intelligence. H. W. C. Davis was general editor

of the Oxford Pamphlets justifying Britain's role in the war, while Algernon Cecil

(nephew of Lord Salisbury) was in the intelligence division of the Admiralty and later in

the historical section of the Foreign Office. J. W. Headlam-Morley was adviser on all

historical matters at Wellington House (the propaganda department) in 1915-1918 and

assistant director of political intelligence in the Department of Information in 1917-1918,

ultimately being shifted to similar work in the Foreign Office in 1918.

In the War Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918, while Amery was assistant

to the Secretary from 1917 until Milner took him to the Colonial Office a year or so later.

This enumeration, by no means complete, indicates the all-pervasive influence of this

small clique in the later years of the war. This influence was not devoted exclusively to

winning the war, and, as time went on, it was directed increasingly toward the postwar

settlement. As a result, both groups tended more and more to concentrate in the Foreign

Office. There G. W. Prothero, an old member of the Cecil Bloc, was put in charge of the

preparations for the future peace conference. Depending chiefly on his own branch of the

Foreign Office (the Historical Section), but also using men and materials from the War

Trade Intelligence Department and the Intelligence Section of the Admiralty, he prepared

a large number of reports on questions that might arise at the Peace Conference (1917-

1919). In 1920, 155 volumes of these reports were published under the title Peace

Handbooks. A glance at any complete list of these will show that a very large number of

the "experts" who wrote them were from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. About the

same time, Phillimore and Zimmern prepared drafts for the organization of the future

League of Nations. Most of the group went en masse to the Peace Conference at Paris as

expert advisers, and anyone familiar with the history of the Peace Conference cannot fail

to recognize names which we have mentioned frequently. At about this time, Lloyd

George began to get out of hand as far as the Milner Group was concerned, and doubtless

also as far as the Cecil Bloc was concerned. Some of this was caused by the weakness of

Balfour, titular head of the latter group, but much more was caused by the fact that the

Group could not control Lloyd George either in his electoral campaign in December 1918

or in his negotiations in the Council of Four from March to June 1919. Lloyd George was

perfectly willing to use

the abilities of the Milner Group in administration, but, when it came to an appeal to the

electorate, as in the "khaki election," he had no respect for the Group's judgment or

advice. Lloyd George realized that the electorate was hysterical with hatred of Germany,

and was willing to appeal to that feeling if he could ride into office again on its impetus.

The Milner Croup, on the other hand, was eager to get rid of the Kaiser, the Prussian

officers' corps, and even the Junker landlords, but, once Germany was defeated, their

feeling of animosity against her (which had waxed strong since before 1896) vanished.

By 1919 they began to think in terms of balance of power and of the need to reconstruct

Germany against the dangers of "bolshevism" on one hand and of "French militarism" on

the other, and they felt that if Germany were made democratic and treated in a friendly

fashion she could be incorporated into the British world system as well as the Cape Boers

had been. The intellectual climate of the Milner Group early in 1919 has been described

by a man who was, at this time, close to the Group, Harold Nicolson, in his volume

Peacemaking, 1919.

This point of view was never thoroughly thought out by the Group. It was apparently

based on the belief that if Germany were treated in a conciliatory fashion she could be

won from her aggressive attitudes and become a civilized member of the British world

system. This may have been possible, but, if so, the plan was very badly executed,

because the aggressive elements in Germany were not eliminated and the conciliatory

elements were not encouraged in a concrete fashion. This failure, however, was partly

caused by the pressure of public opinion, by the refusal of the French to accept this

concept as an adequate goal of foreign policy, and by the failure to analyze the methods

of the policy in a sound and adequate fashion. The first step toward this policy was made

by Milner himself as early as October 1918, when he issued a warning not to denounce

"the whole German nation as monsters of iniquity" or to carry out a policy of punishment

and reprisal against them." The outburst of public indignation at this sentiment was so

great that "the whole band of men who had learned under him in South Africa to

appreciate his patriotism united to testify to him their affectionate respect." This

quotation from one of the band, Basil Williams, refers to a testimonial given by the

Group to their leader in 1918.

Another evidence of this feeling will be found in a volume of Alfred Zimmern's,

published in 1922 under the title Europe in Convalescence and devoted to regretting

Britain's postwar policies and especially the election of 1918. Strangely enough,

Zimmern, although most articulate in this volume, was basically more anti-German than

the other members of the Group and did not share their rather naive belief that the

Germans could be redeemed merely by the victors tossing away the advantages of

victory. Zimmern had a greater degree of sympathy for the French idea that the Germans

should give more concrete examples of a reformed spirit before they were allowed to run

freely in civilized society.(3) Halifax, on the other hand, was considerably more

influenced by popular feeling in 1918 and years later. He shared the public hysteria

against Germany in 1918 to a degree which he later wished to forget, just as in 1937 he

shared the appeasement policy toward Germany to a degree he would now doubtless

want to forget. Both of these men, however were not of the inner circle of the Milner

Group. The sentiments of that inner circle, men like Kerr, Brand, and Dawson, can be

found in the speeches of the first, The Times editorials of the last, and the articles of The

Round Table. They can also be seen in the letters of John Dove. The latter, writing to

Brand, 4 October 1923, stated: "It seems to me that the most disastrous affect of

Poincare's policy would be the final collapse of democracy in Germany, the risk of which

has been pointed out in The Round Table. The irony of the whole situation is that if the

Junkers should capture the Reich again, the same old antagonisms will revive and we

shall find ourselves, willy-nilly, lined up again with France to avert a danger which

French action has again called into being.... Even if Smuts follows up his fine speech, the

situation may have changed so much before the Imperial Conference is over that people

who think like him and us may find themselves baffled.... I doubt if we shall again have

as good a chance of getting a peaceful democracy set up in Germany."

Chapter 9—Creation of the Commonwealth

The evolution of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations is to a very

great extent a result of the activities of the Milner Group. To be sure, the ultimate goal of

the Group was quite different from the present system, since they wanted a federation of

the Empire, but this was a long-run goal, and en route they accepted the present system as

a temporary way station. However, the strength of colonial and Dominion feeling, which

made the ideal of federation admittedly remote at all times, has succeeded in making this

way-station a permanent terminal and thus had eliminated, apparently forever, the hope

for federation. With the exception of a few diehards (of whom Milner and Curtis were the

leaders), the Group has accepted the solution of imperial cooperation and "parallelism" as

an alternative to federation. This was definitely stated in The Round Table of December

1920. In that issue the Group adopted the path of cooperation as its future policy and

added: "Its [ The Round Tables] promoters in this country feel bound to state that all the

experience of the war and of the peace has not shaken in the least the fundamental

conviction with which they commenced the publication of this Review.... The Round

Table has never expressed an opinion as to the form which this constitutional

organization would take, nor as to the time when it should be undertaken. But it has never

disguised its conviction that a cooperate system would eventually break down." In

September 1935, in a review of its first twenty-five years, the journal stated: "Since the

war, therefore, though it has never abandoned its view that the only final basis for

freedom and enduring peace is the organic union of nations in a commonwealth

embracing the whole world or, in the first instance, a lesser part of it, The Round Table

has been a consistent supporter . . . of the principles upon which the British Empire now

rests, as set forth in the Balfour Memorandum of 1926.... It has felt that only by trying the

cooperation method to the utmost and realizing its limitations in practice would nations

within or without the British Empire be brought to face the necessity for organic union."

There apparently exists within the Milner Group a myth to the effect that they

invented the expression "Commonwealth of Nations," that it was derived from Zimmern's

book The Greek Commonwealth (published in 1911) and first appeared in public in the title of Curtis's book in 1916. This is not quite accurate, for the older imperialists of the

Cecil Bloc had used the term "commonwealth" in reference to the British Empire on

various occasions as early as 1884. In that year, in a speech at Adelaide, Australia, Lord

Rosebery referred to the possibility of New Zealand seceding from the Empire and

added: "God forbid. There is no need for any nation, however great, leaving the Empire,

because the Empire is a Commonwealth of Nations."

If the Milner Group did not invent the term, they gave it a very definite and special

meaning, based on Zimmern's book, and they popularized the use of the expression.

According to Zimmern, the expression "commonwealth" referred to a community based

on freedom and the rule of law, in distinction to a government based on authority or even

arbitrary tyranny. The distinction was worked out in Zimmern's book in the contrast

between Athens, as described in Pericles's funeral oration, and Sparta (or the actual

conduct of the Athenian empire). As applied to the modern world, the contrast was

between the British government, as described by Dicey, and the despotisms of Philip II,

Wilhelm II, and Nicholas II. In this sense of the word, commonwealth was not originally

an alternative to federation, as it later became, since it referred to the moral qualities of

government, and these could exist within either a federated or a nonfederated Empire.

The expression "British Commonwealth of Nations" was, then, not invented by the

Group but was given a very special meaning and was propagated in this sense until it

finally became common usage. The first step in this direction was taken on 15 May 1917,

when General Smuts, at a banquet in his honor in the Houses of Parliament, used the

expression. This banquet was apparently arranged by the Milner Group, and Lord Milner

sat at Smuts's right hand during the speech. The speech itself was printed and given the

widest publicity, being disseminated throughout Great Britain, the Commonwealth, the

United States, and the rest of the world. In retrospect, some persons have believed that

Smuts was rejecting the meaning of the expression as used by the Milner Group, because

he did reject the project for imperial federation in this speech. This, however, is a

mistake, for, as we have said, the expression "commonwealth" at that time had a meaning

which could include either federation or cooperation among the members of the British

imperial system. The antithesis in meaning between federation and commonwealth is a

later development which took place outside the Group. To this day, men like Curtis,

Amery, and Grigg still use the term "commonwealth" as applied to a federated Empire,

and they always define the word "commonwealth" as "a government of liberty under the

law" and not as an arrangement of independent but cooperating states.

The development of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations and the

role which the Milner Group played in this development cannot be understood by anyone

who feels that federation and commonwealth were mutually exclusive ideas.

In fact, there were not two ideas, but three, and they were not regarded by the Group

as substitutes for each other but as supplements to each other. These three ideas were: (1)

the creation of a common ideology and world outlook among the peoples of the United

Kingdom, the Empire, and the United States; (2) the creation of instruments and practices

of cooperation among these various communities in order that they might pursue parallel

policies; and (3) the creation of a federation on an imperial, Anglo-American, or world

basis. The Milner Group regarded these as supplementary to one another and worked

vigorously for all of them, without believing that they were mutually exclusive

alternatives. They always realized, even the most fanatical of them, that federation, even

of the Empire only, was very remote. They always, in this connection, used such

expressions as "not in our lifetime" or "not in the present century." They always insisted

that the basic unity of any system must rest on common ideology, and they worked in this

direction through the Rhodes Scholarships, the Round Table Groups, and the Institutes of

International Affairs, even when they were most ardently seeking to create organized

constitutional relationships. And in these constitutional relationships they worked equally

energetically and simultaneously for imperial federation and for such instruments of

cooperation as conferences of Prime Ministers of Dominions. The idea, which seems to

have gained currency, that the Round Table Group was solely committed to federation

and that the failure of this project marked the defeat and eclipse of the Group is

erroneous. On the contrary, by the 1930s, the Round Table Group was working so

strongly for a common ideology and for institutions of cooperation that many believers in

federation regarded them as defeatist. For this reason, some believers in federation

organized a new movement called the "World Commonwealth Movement." Evidence of

this movement is an article by Lord Davies in The Nineteenth Century and After for

January 1935, called " Round Table or World Commonwealth?" This new movement was

critical of the foreign policy rather than the imperial policy of the Round Table Group,

especially its policy of appeasement toward Germany and of weakening the League of

Nations, and its belief that Britain could find security in isolation from the Continent and

a balance-of-power policy supported by the United Kingdom, the Dominions, and the

United States.

The effort of the Round Table Group to create a common ideology to unite the

supporters of the British way of life appears in every aspect of their work. It was derived

from Rhodes and Milner and found its most perfect manifestation in the Rhodes

Scholarships. As a result of these and of the Milner Group's control of so much of

Oxford, Oxford tended to become an international university. Here the Milner Group had

to tread a narrow path between the necessity of training non-English (including

Americans and Indians) in the English way of life and the possibility of submerging that

way of life completely (at Oxford, at least) by admitting too many non-English to its

cloistered halls. On the whole, this path was followed with considerable success, as will

be realized by anyone who has had any experience with Rhodes Scholars. To be sure, the

visitors from across the seas picked up the social customs of the English somewhat more

readily than they did the English ideas of playing the game or the English ideas of

politics, but, on the whole, the experiment of Rhodes, Milner, and Lothian cannot be

called a failure. It was surely a greater success in the United States than it was in the

Dominions or in India, for in the last, at least, the English idea of liberty was assimilated

much more completely than the idea of loyalty to England.

The efforts of the Milner Group to encourage federation of the Empire have already

been indicated. They failed and, indeed, were bound to fail, as most members of the

Group soon realized. As early as 1903, John Buchan and Joseph Chamberlain had given

up the attempt. By 1917, even Curtis had accepted the idea that federation was a very

remote possibility, although in his case, at least, it remained as the beckoning will-o-the-

wisp by which all lesser goals were measured and found vaguely dissatisfying.(1)

The third string to the bow—imperial cooperation—remained. It became in time the

chief concern of the Group. The story of these efforts is a familiar one, and no attempt

will be made here to repeat it. We are concerned only with the role played by the Milner

Group in these efforts. In general this role was very large, if not decisive.

The proposals for imperial cooperation had as their basic principle the assumption that

communities which had a common ideology could pursue parallel courses toward the

same goal merely by consultation among their leaders. For a long time, the Milner Group

did not see that the greater the degree of success obtained by this method, the more

remote was the possibility that federation could ever be attained. It is very likely that the

Group was misled in this by the fact that they were for many years extremely fortunate in

keeping members of the Group in positions of power and influence in the Dominions. As

long as men like Smuts, Botha (who did what Smuts wanted), Duncan, Feetham, or Long

were in influential positions in South Africa; as long as men like Eggleston, Bavin, or

Dudley Braham were influential in Australia; as long as men like Glazebrook, Massey,

Joseph Flavelle, or Percy Corbett were influential in Canada—in a nutshell, as long as

members of the Milner Group were influential throughout the Dominions, the technique

of the parallel policy of cooperation would be the easiest way to reach a common goal.

Unfortunately, this was not a method that could be expected to continue forever, and

when the Milner Group grew older and weaker, it could not be expected that their newer

recruits in England (like Hodson, Coupland, Actor, Woodward, Elton, and others) could

continue to work on a parallel policy with the newer arrivals to power in the Dominions.

When that unhappy day arrived, the Milner Group should have had institutionalized

modes of procedure firmly established. They did not, not because they did not want them,

but because their members in the Dominions could not have remained in influential

positions if they had insisted on creating institutionalized links with Britain when the

people of the Dominions obviously did not want such links.

The use of Colonial or Imperial Conferences as a method for establishing closer

contact with the various parts of the Empire was originally established by the Cecil Bloc

and taken over by the Milner Group. The first four such Conferences (in 1887, 1897,

1902, and 1907) were largely dominated by the former group, although they were not

technically in power during the last one. The decisive changes made in the Colonial

Conference system at the Conference of 1907 were worked out by a secret group, which

consulted on the plans for eighteen months and presented them to the Royal Colonial

Institute in April 1905. These plans were embodied in a dispatch from the Colonial

Secretary, Alfred Lyttelton, and carried out at the Conference of 1907. As a result, it was

established that the name of the meeting was to be changed to Imperial Conference; it

was to be called into session every four years; it was to consist of Prime Ministers of the

self-governing parts of the Empire; the Colonial Secretary was to be eliminated from the

picture; and a new Dominion Department, under Sir Charles Lucas, was to be set up in

the Colonial Office. As the future Lord Lothian wrote in The Round Table in 1911, the

final result was to destroy the hopes for federation by recognizing the separate existence

of the Dominions.(2)

At the Conference of 1907, at the suggestion of Haldane, there was created a

Committee of Imperial Defence, and a plan was adopted to organize Dominion defense

forces on similar patterns, so that they could be integrated in an emergency. The second

of these proposals, which led to a complete reorganization of the armies of New Zealand,

Australia, and South Africa in 1909-1912, with very beneficial results in the crisis of

1914-1918, is not of immediate concern to us. The Committee of Imperial Defence and

its secretarial staff were creations of Lord Esher, who had been chairman of a special

committee to reform the War Office in 1903 and was permanent member of the

Committee of Imperial Defence from 1905 to his death. As a result of his influence, the

secretariat of this committee became a branch of the Milner Group and later became the

secretariat of the Cabinet itself, when that body first obtained a secretariat in 1917.

From this secretarial staff the Milner Group obtained three recruits in the period after

1918. These were Maurice Hankey, Ernest Swinton, and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore (now

Lord Harlech). Hankey was assistant secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence

from 1908 to 1912 and was secretary from 1912 to 1938. Swinton was assistant secretary

from 1917 to 1925. Both became members of the Milner Group, Hankey close to the

inner circle, Swinton in one of the less central rings. Ormsby-Gore was an assistant

secretary in 1917-1918 at the same time that he was private secretary to Lord Milner. All

three of these men are of sufficient importance to justify a closer examination of their

careers.

Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey (Sir Maurice after 1916, Baron Hankey since 1939),

whose family was related by marriage to the Wyndhams, was born in 1877 and joined the

Royal Marines when he graduated from Rugby in 1895. He retired from that service in

1918 as a lieutenant colonel and was raised to colonel on the retired list in 1929. He was

attached for duty with the Naval Intelligence Department in 1902 and by this route

reached the staff of the Committee of Imperial Defence six years later. In 1917, when it

was decided to give the Cabinet a secretariat for the first time, and to create the Imperial

War Cabinet by adding overseas representatives to the British War Cabinet (a change in

which Milner played the chief role), the secretariat of the Committee of Imperial Defence

became also the secretariat of the other two bodies. At the same time, as we have seen,

the Prime Minister was given a secretariat consisting of two members of the Milner

Group (Kerr and Adams). In this way Hankey became secretary and Swinton assistant

secretary to the Cabinet, the former holding that post, along with the parallel post in the

Committee of Imperial Defence, until 1938. It was undoubtedly through Hankey and the

Milner Group that Swinton became Chichele Professor of Military History and a Fellow

of All Souls in 1925. As for Hankey himself, he became one of the more significant

figures in the Milner Group, close to the inner circle and one of the most important

(although relatively little-known) figures in British history of recent times. He was clerk

of the Privy Council in 1923-1938; he was secretary to the British delegation at the Peace

Conference of 1919, at the Washington Conference of 1921, at the Genoa Conference of

1922, and at the London Reparations Conference of 1924. He was secretary general of

the Hague Conference of 1929-1930, of the London Naval Conference of 1930, and of

the Lausanne Conference of 1932. He was secretary general of the British Imperial

Conferences of 1921, 1923, 1926, 1930, and 1937. He retired in 1938, but became a

member of the Permanent Mandates Commission (succeeding Lord Hailey) in 1939. He

was British government director of the Suez Canal Company in 1938-1939, Minister

without Portfolio in 1939-1940, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1940-1941,

Paymaster General in 1941-1942, chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee and of

the Engineering Advisory Committee in 1942-1943. At the present time he is a director

of the Suez Canal Company (since 1945), chairman of the Technical Personnel

Committee (since 1941), chairman of the Interdepartmental Committee on Further

Education and Training and of the Committee on Higher Appointments in the Civil

Service (since 1944), and chairman of the Colonial Products Research Committee (since

1942). Hankey, in 1903, married Adeline de Smidt, daughter of a well-known South

African political figure. His oldest son, Robert, is now a First Secretary in the diplomatic

service, while his daughter, Ursula, has been married since 1929 to John A. Benn,

chairman of the board of Benn Brothers, publishers.

Hankey was Lord Esher's chief protege in the Milner Group and in British public life.

They were in constant communication with one another, and Esher gave Hankey a

constant stream of advice about his conduct in his various official positions. The

following scattered examples can be gleaned from the published Journals and Letters of

Reginald, Viscount Esher. On 18 February 1919, Esher wrote Hankey, advising him not

to accept the position as Secretary General of the League of Nations. On 7 December

1919, he gave him detailed advice on how to conduct himself as secretary to the

Conference of Dominion Prime Ministers, telling him to work for "a League of Empire"

based on cooperation and not on any "rigid constitutional plan," to try to get an Imperial

General Staff, and to use the Defence Committee as such a staff in the meantime. In

1929, when Ramsay MacDonald tried to exclude Hankey from a secret Cabinet meeting,

Esher went so far in support of his protege as to write a letter of admonition to the Prime

Minister. This letter, dated 21 July 1929, said: "What is this I see quoted from a London

paper that you are excluding your Secretary from Cabinet meetings? It probably is untrue,

for you are the last person in the world to take a retrograde step toward 'secrecy' whether

in diplomacy or government. The evolution of our Cabinet system from 'Cabal' has been

slow but sure. When the Secretary to the Cabinet became an established factor in

conducting business, almost the last traces of Mumbo Jumbo, cherished from the days

when Bolingbroke was a danger to public peace, disappeared."

Hankey was succeeded as secretary of the Cabinet in 1938 by Edward E. Bridges, who

has been close to the Milner Group since he became a Fellow of All Souls in 1920.

Bridges, son of the late Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, had the advantages of a good

education at Eton and Magdalen. He was a Treasury civil servant from 1919, was

knighted in 1939, and since 1945 has combined with his Cabinet position the exalted post

of Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and head of His Majesty's Civil Service.

The Imperial Conference of 1911 has little concern with our story, although Asquith's

opening speech could have been written in the office of The Round Table. Indeed, it is

quoted with approval by Lionel Curtis in his The Problem of the Commonwealth,

published five years later. Asquith pointed out that the Empire rested on three

foundations: (a) the reign of law, in Dicey's sense, (b) local autonomy, and (c) trusteeship

of the interests and fortunes of fellow subjects who have not yet attained "to the full

stature of self-government." He then pointed out the two principles of centralization and

disintegration which had applied to the Empire in the early Victorian period, and

declared: "Neither of these theories commands the faintest support today, either at home

or in any part of our self-governing Empire.... Whether in this United Kingdom or in any

one of the great communities which you represent, we each of us are, and we each of us

intend to remain, master in our own household. This is, here at home and throughout the

Dominions, the lifeblood of our polity." Thus spoke Asquith, and even the ultra-federalist

Curtis approved. He also approved when Asquith squelched Sir John Ward's suggestion

for the creation of an Imperial Council, although doubtless from quite a different

motivation.

At the Conference of 1911, as is well known, the overseas members were for the first

time initiated into the mysteries of high policy, because of the menace of Germany.

Except for this, which paid high dividends in 1914, the Conference was largely wasted

motion.

The Conference of 1915 was not held, because of the war, but as soon as Milner came

into the government in December 1915, The Round Table's argument that the war should

be used as a means for consolidating the Empire, rather than as an excuse for postponing

consolidation, began to take effect. The Round Table during 1915 was agitating for an

immediate Imperial Conference with Indian participation for the first time. As soon as

Milner joined the Cabinet in December 1915, he sent out cables to the Dominions and to

India, inviting them to come. It was Milner also who created the Imperial War Cabinet by

adding Dominion members to the British War Cabinet. These developments were

foretold and approved by The Round Table. In its June 1917 issue it said, in the course of

a long article on "New Developments in the Constitution of the Empire":

“At a date which cannot be far distant an Imperial Conference will assemble, the

purpose of which will be to consider what further steps can be taken to transform the

Empire of a State in which the main responsibilities and burdens of its common affairs

are sustained and controlled by the United Kingdom into a commonwealth of equal

nations conducting its foreign policy and common affairs by some method of continuous

consultation and concerted action.... The decision today is against any federated

reconstruction after the war.... It is evident, however, that the institution through which

the improved Imperial system will chiefly work will be the newly constituted Imperial

Cabinet. The Imperial Cabinet will be different in some important respects from the

Imperial Conference. It will meet annually instead of once in four years. It will be

concerned more particularly with foreign policy, which the Imperial Conference has

never yet discussed.... Its proceedings will consequently be secret.... It will also consist of

the most important British Ministers sitting in conclave with the Overseas Ministers

instead of the Secretary of State for the Colonies alone as has been usually the case

hitherto.”

As is well known, the Imperial War Cabinet met fourteen times in 1917, met again in

1918, and assembled at Paris in 1918-1919 as the British Empire delegation to the Peace

Conference. Parallel with it, the Imperial War Conference met in London in 1917, under

the Colonial Secretary, to discuss non-war problems. At the meetings of the former body

it was decided to hold annual meetings in the future and to invite the Dominions to

establish resident ministers in London to insure constant consultation. At a meeting in

1917 was drawn up the famous Imperial Resolution, which excluded federation as a

solution of the imperial problem and recognized the complete equality of the Dominions

and the United Kingdom under one King. These developments were not only acceptable

to Milner but apparently were largely engineered by him. On 9 July 1919, he issued a

formal statement containing the sentences, "The only possibility of a continuance of the

British Empire is on a basis of absolute-out-and-out-equal partnership between the United

Kingdom and the Dominions. I say that without any kind of reservation whatever."

When Milner died, in May 1925, The Times obituary had this to say about this portion

of his life:

“With the special meeting of the War Cabinet attended by the Dominion Prime

Ministers which, beginning on March 20, came to be distinguished as the Imperial War

Cabinet . . . Milner was more closely concerned than any other British statesman. The

conception of the Imperial War Cabinet and the actual proposal to bring the Dominion

Premiers into the United Kingdom Cabinet were his. And when, thanks to Mr. Lloyd

George's ready acceptance of the proposal, Milner's conception was realized, it proved to

be not only a solution of the problem of Imperial Administrative unity in its then transient

but most urgent phase, but a permanent and far-reaching advance in the constitutional

evolution of the Empire. It met again in 1918, and was continued as the British Empire

Delegation in the peace negotiations at Versailles in 1919. Thus, at the moment of its

greatest need, the Empire was furnished by Milner with a common Executive. For the

Imperial War Cabinet could and did, take executive action, and its decisions bound the

Empire at large.”(3)

It was also Milner who insisted on and made the arrangements for the Imperial

Conference of 1921, acting in his capacity as Colonial Secretary, although he was forced,

by reason of poor health, to resign before the conference assembled. It was in this period

as Colonial Secretary that Milner, assisted by Amery, set up the plans for the new

"dyarchic" constitution for Malta, gave Egypt its full freedom, set Curtis to work on the

Irish problem, and gave Canada permission to establish its own legation in the United

States—the latter post filled only in 1926, and then by the son-in-law of Milner's closest

collaborator in the Rhodes Trust.

The Imperial Conferences of 1921 and 1923 were largely in the control of the Cecil

Bloc, at least so far as the United Kingdom delegation was concerned. Three of the five

members of this delegation in 1921 were from this Bloc (Balfour, Curzon, and Austen

Chamberlain), the other two being Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Of the members

of the other five delegations, only Smuts, from South Africa, is of significance to us. On

the secretarial staff for the United Kingdom delegation, we might point out the presence

of Hankey and Grigg.

In the Imperial Conference of 1923 we find a similar situation. Three of the four

delegates from the United Kingdom were of the Cecil Bloc (Lord Salisbury, Curzon, and

the Duke of Devonshire), the other being Prime Minister Baldwin. Smuts again led the

South African delegation. The secretarial staff was headed by Hankey, while the separate

Indian secretarial group was led by L. F. Rushbrook Williams. The latter, whom we have

already mentioned, had been associated with the Milner Group since he was elected a

Fellow of All Souls in 1914, had done special work in preparation of the Government of

India Act of 1919, and worked under Marris in applying that act after it became law. His

later career carried him to various parts of the Milner Group's extensive system, as can be

seen from the fact that he was a delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations in

1925, Foreign Minister of Patiala State in 1925-1931, a member of the Indian Round

Table Conference in 1920-1932, a significant figure in the British Broadcasting

Corporation and the Ministry of Information in delegation. There is nothing to indicate

that Mr. Latham (later Sir John) was a member of the Milner Group, but in later years his

son, Richard, clearly was. Sir John had apparently made his first contact with the Milner

Group in 1919, when he, a Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, was a

member of the staff of the Australian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and, while

there, became an assistant secretary to the British delegation. In 1922, at the age of forty-

five, he began a twelve-year term as an Australian M. P. During that brief period he was

Attorney General in 1925-1929, Minister of Industry in 1928-1929, Leader of the

Opposition in 1929-1931, Deputy Leader of the Majority in 1931-1932, and Deputy

Prime Minister, Attorney General, and Minister for Industry in 1932-1934. In addition, he

was British secretary to the Allied Commission on Czechoslovak Affairs in 1919, first

president of the League of Nations Union, Australian delegate to the League of Nations

in 1926 and 1932, Australian representative to the World Disarmament Conference in

1932, Chancellor of the University of Melbourne in 1939-1941; Australian Minister of

Japan in 1940-1941, and vice-president of the period 1932-1944, and is now a member of

the editorial staff of The Times.

At these two conferences, various members of the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group were

called in for consultation on matters within their competence. Of these persons, we might

mention the names of H. A. L. Fisher, Sir Eyre Crowe, Sir Cecil Hurst, Robert Cecil,

Leopold Amery, Samuel Hoare, and Sir Fabian Ware (of the Kindergarten).

The Imperial Conference of 1926 is generally recognized as one of the most important

of the postwar period. The Cecil Bloc and Milner Group again had three out of five

members of the United Kingdom delegation (Balfour, Austen Chamberlain, and Leopold

Amery), with Baldwin and Churchill the other two. Hankey was, as usual, secretary of

the conference. Of the other seven delegations, nothing is germane to our investigation

except that Vincent Massey was an adviser to the Canadian, and John Greig Latham was

a member of the Australian, Australian Red Cross in 1944. Since 1934, he has been Chief

Justice of Australia. In this brilliant, if belated, career, Sir John came into contact with the

Milner Group, and this undoubtedly assisted his son, Richard, in his more precocious

career. Richard Latham was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford until 1933 and a Fellow of All

Souls from 1935. He wrote the supplementary legal chapter in W. K. Hancock's Survey of

British Commonwealth Affairs and was one of the chief advisers of K. C. Wheare in his

famous book, The Statute of Westminister and Dominion Status (1938). Unfortunately,

Richard Latham died a few years later while still in his middle thirties. It is clear from

Professor Wheare's book that Sir John Latham, although a member of the opposition at

the time, was one of the chief figures in Australia's acceptance of the Statute of

Westminster.

The new status of the Dominions, as enunciated in the Report of the conference and

later known as the "Balfour Declaration," was accepted by the Milner Group both in The

Round Table and in The Times. In the latter, on 22 November 1926, readers were

informed that the"Declaration" merely described the Empire as it was, with nothing really

new except the removal of a few anachronisms. It concluded: "In all its various clauses

there is hardly a statement or a definition which does not coincide with familiar practice."

The Imperial Conference of 1930 was conducted by a Labour government and had no

members of the Cecil Bloc or Milner Group among its chief delegates. Sir Maurice

Hankey, however, was secretary of the conference, and among its chief advisers were

Maurice Gwyer and H. D. Henderson. Both of these were members of All Souls and

probably close to the Milner Group.

The Imperial Conference of 1937 was held during the period in which the Milner

Group was at the peak of its power. Of the eight members of the United Kingdom

delegation, five were from the Milner Group (Lord Halifax, Sir John Simon, Malcolm

MacDonald, W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, and Sir Samuel Hoare). The others were Baldwin,

Neville Chamberlain, and J. Ramsay MacDonald. In addition, the chief of the Indian

delegation was the Marquess of Zetland of the Cecil Bloc. Sir Maurice Hankey was

secretary of the conference, and among the advisers were Sir Donald Somervell (of All

Souls and the Milner Group), Vincent Massey, Sir Fabian Ware, and the Marquess of

Hartington.

In addition to the Imperial Conferences, where the influence of the Milner Group was

probably more extensive than appears from the membership of the delegations, the Group

was influential in the administration of the Commonwealth, especially in the two periods

of its greatest power, from 1924 to 1929 and from 1935 to 1939. An indication of this can

be seen in the fact that the office of Colonial Secretary was held by the Group for seven

out of ten years from 1919 to 1929 and for five out of nine years from 1931 to 1940,

while the office of Dominion Secretary was held by a member of the Group for eight out

of the fourteen years from its creation in 1925 to the outbreak of the war in 1939

(although the Labour Party was in power for two of those years). The Colonial

Secretaries to whom we have reference were:

Lord Milner, 1919-1921

Leopold Amery, 1924-1929

Malcolm MacDonald, 1935

W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, 1936-1938

Malcolm MacDonald, 1938-1940

The Dominion Secretaries to whom we have reference were:

Amery, 1925-1929

Malcolm MacDonald, 1935-1938, 1938-1939

The lesser positions within the Colonial Office were not remote from the Milner

Group. The Permanent Under Secretary was Sir George Fiddes of the Kindergarten in

1916-1921. In addition, James Masterton-Smith, who had been Balfour's private secretary

previously, was Permanent Under Secretary in succession to Fiddes in 1921-1925, and

John Maffey, who had been Lord Chelmsford's secretary while the latter was Viceroy in

1916-1921, was Permanent Under Secretary from 1933 to 1937. The position of

Parliamentary Under Secretary, which had been held by Lord Selborne in 1895-1900 and

by Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland in 1915-1917, was held by Amery in 1919-1921, by Edward

Wood (Lord Halifax) in 1921-1922, by Ormsby-Gore in 1922-1924, 1924-1929, and by

Lord Dufferin (brother of Lord Blackwood of the Kindergarten) from 1937 to 1940.

Most of these persons (probably all except Masterton-Smith, Maffey, and Lord

Dufferin) were members of the Milner Group. The most important, of course, was

Leopold Amery, whom we have already shown as Milner's chief political protege. We

have not yet indicated that Malcolm MacDonald was a member of the Milner Group, and

must be satisfied at this point with saying that he was a member, or at least an instrument,

of the Group, from 1931 or 1932 onward, without ever becoming a member of the inner

circle. The evidence indicating this relationship will be discussed later.

At this point we should say a few words about W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech

since 1938), who was a member of the Cecil Bloc by marriage and of the Milner Group

by adoption. A graduate of Eton in 1930, he went to New College as a contemporary of

Philip Kerr and Reginald Coupland. He took his degree in 1908 and was made a Fellow

of New College in 1936. A Conservative member of Parliament from 1910 until he went

to the Upper House in 1938, he spent the early years of the First World War in military

intelligence, chiefly in Egypt. In 1913 he married Lady Beatrice Cecil, daughter of the

fourth Marquess of Salisbury, and four years later became Parliamentary Private

Secretary to Lord Milner as well as assistant secretary to the War Cabinet (associated in

the latter post with Hankey, Kerr, W. G. S. Adams, and Amery of the Milner Group).

Ormsby-Gore went on a mission to Palestine in 1918 and was with the British delegation

at the Paris Peace Conference as an expert on the Middle East. He was Under Secretary

for the Colonies with the Duke of Devonshire in 1922-1924 and with Leopold Amery in

1924-1929, becoming Colonial Secretary in his own right in 1936-1938. In the interval he

was Postmaster General in 1931 and First Commissioner of Works in 1931-1936. He was

a member of the Permanent Mandates Commission (1921-1923) and of the Colonial

Office Mission to the British West Indies (1921-1922), and was Chairman of the East

African Parliamentary Commission in 1924. He was High Commissioner of South Africa

and the three native protectorates in 1941-1944. He has been a director of the Midland

Bank and of the Standard Bank of South Africa. He was also one of the founders of the

Royal Institute of International Affairs, a member of Lord Lothian's committee on the

African Survey, and a member of the council of the Institute.

The Milner Group also influenced Commonwealth affairs by publicity work of great

quantity and good quality. This was done through the various periodicals controlled by

the Group, such as The Round Table, The Times, International Affairs and others; by

books published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs and individual members of

the Group; by academic and university activities by men like Professor Coupland,

Professor Zimmern, Professor Harlow, and others; by public and private discussion

meetings sponsored by the Round Table Groups throughout the Commonwealth, by the

Institute of International Affairs everywhere, by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR),

by the Council on Foreign Relations, by the Williamstown Institute of Politics, by the

Rhodes Scholarship group; and through the three unofficial conferences on British

Commonwealth relations held by the Group since 1933. Some of these organizations and

activities have already been mentioned. The last will be discussed here. The rest are to be

described in Chapter 10.

The three unofficial conferences on British Commonwealth relations were held at

Toronto in 1933, at Sydney in 1938, and at London in 1945. They were initiated and

controlled by the Milner Group, acting through the various Institutes of International

Affairs, in the hope that they would contribute to the closer union of the Commonwealth

by inclining the opinion of prominent persons in the Dominions in that direction. The

plan was originated by the British Empire members of the Institute of Pacific Relations at

the Kyoto meeting in 1929. The members from Great Britain consisted of Lord Robert

Cecil, Sir Herbert Samuel, Sir Donald Somervell, Sir John Power, P. J. Noel-Baker, G.

M. Gathorne-Hardy, H. V. Hodson, H. W. Kerr, A. J. Toynbee, J. W. Wheeler-Bennett,

and A. E. Zimmern. Of these, two were from the Cecil Bloc and five from the Milner

Group. Discussion was continued at the Shanghai meeting of the Institute of Pacific

Relations in 1931, and a committee under Robert Cecil drew up an agenda for the

unofficial conference. This committee made the final arrangements at a meeting in

Chatham House in July 1932 and published as a preliminary work a volume called

Consultation and Cooperation in the British Commonwealth.

The conference was held at the University of Toronto, 11-21 September 1933, with

forty-three delegates and thirty-three secretaries, the traveling expenses being covered by

a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The United Kingdom delegation consisted of the

eleven names mentioned above plus R. C. M. Arnold as private secretary to Lord Cecil

and J. P. Maclay (the famous shipbuilder) as private secretary to Sir Herbert Samuel. The

Australian delegation of six included Professor A. H. Charteris, Professor Ernest Scott,

A. Smithies (a Rhodes Scholar of 1929), Alfred Stirling (an Oxford B.A.), W. J. V.

Windeyer, and Richard Latham (a Rhodes Scholar of 1933). The Canadian delegation

consisted of N. W. Rowell, Sir Robert Borden, Louis Cote, John W. Dafoe, Sir Robert

Falconer, Sir Joseph Flavelle, W. Sanford Evans, Vincent Massey, René L. Morin, J. S.

Woodsworth, W. M. Birks, Charles J. Burchell, Brooke Claxton, Percy E. Corbett, W. P.

M. Kennedy, J. J. MacDonnell (Rhodes Trustee for Canada), and E. J. Tarr. The secretary

to the delegation was George Parkin Glazebrook (Balliol 1924). Most of these names are

significant, but we need only point out that at least four of them, including the secretary

were members of the Milner Group (Massey, Corbett, Flavelle, Glazebrook). The New

Zealand delegation had three members, one of which was W. Downie Stewart, and the

South African delegation had five members, including F. S. Malan and Professor Eric A.

Walker. The secretariat to the whole conference was headed by I. S. Macadam of the

Royal Institute of International Affairs. The secretary to the United Kingdom delegation

was H. V. Hodson. Thus it would appear that the Milner Group had eight out of forty-

three delegates, as well as the secretaries to the Canadian and United Kingdom

delegations.

The conference was divided into four commissions, each of which had a chairman and

a rapporteur. In addition, the first commission (on foreign policy) was subdivided into

two subcommittees. The chairmen of the four commissions were Robert Cecil, Vincent

Massey, F. S. Malan, and W. Downie Stewart. Thus the Milner Group had two out of

four. The rapporteurs (including the two subcommittees) were A. L. Zimmern, H. V.

Hodson, P. E. Corbett, E. A. Walker, P. J. Noel-Baker, D. B. Somervell, and A. H.

Charteris. Thus the Milner Group had four out of seven and possibly more (as Walker

may be a member of the Group).

The discussions at the conference were secret, the press was excluded, and in the

published Proceedings, edited by A. J. Toynbee, all remarks were presented in indirect

discourse and considerably curtailed, without identification of the speakers. The

conference made a number of recommendations, including the following: (1) Dominion

High Commissioners in London should be given diplomatic status with direct access to

the Foreign Office; (2) junior members of Dominion Foreign Offices should receive a

period of training in the Foreign Office in London; (3) diplomatic representatives should

be exchanged between Dominions; (4) Commonwealth tribunals should be set up to settle

legal disputes between Dominions; (5) collective security and the League of Nations

should be supported; (6) cooperation with the United States was advocated.

The second unofficial conference on British Commonwealth relations was held near

Sydney, Australia, 3-17 September 1938. The expenses were met by grants from the

Carnegie Corporation and the Rhodes Trustees. The decision to hold the second

conference was made by the British members at the Yosemite meeting of the Institute of

Pacific Relations in 1936. A committee under Viscount Samuel met at Chatham House in

June 1937 and drew up the arrangements and the agenda. The selection of delegates was

left to the various Institutes of International Affairs. From the United Kingdom went Lord

Lothian (chairman), Lionel Curtis, W. K. Hancock, Hugh A. Wyndham, A. L. Zimmern,

Norman Bentwich, Ernest Bevin, V. A. Cazalet, A. M. Fraser, Sir John Burnett-Stuart,

Miss Grace Hadow, Sir Howard Kelly, Sir Frederick Minter, Sir John Pratt, and James

Walker. At least five out of fifteen, including the chairman, were of the Milner Group.

From Australia came thirty-one members, including T. R. Bavin (chairman of the

delegation), K. H. Bailey (a Rhodes Scholar), and A. H. Charteris. From Canada came

fifteen, including E. J. Tarr (chairman of the delegation) and P. E. Corbett. From India

came four Indians. From Ireland came five persons. From New Zealand came fourteen,

with W. Downie Stewart as chairman. From South Africa came six, including P. Van der

Byl (chairman) and G. R. Hofmeyr (an old associate of the Milner Kindergarten in the

Transvaal).

Of ninety delegates, nine were members of the Milner Group and three others may

have been. This is a small proportion, but the conduct of the conference was well

controlled. The chairmen of the three most important delegations were of the Milner

Group (Eggleston, Downie Stewart, and Lothian); the chairman of the conference itself

(Bavin) was. The secretary of the conference was Macadam, the recorder was Hodson,

and the secretary to the press committee was Lionel Vincent Massey (grandson of George

Parkin). The Proceedings of the conference were edited by Hodson, with an Introduction

by Bavin, and published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Again, no

indication was given of who said what.

The third unofficial conference on British Commonwealth relations was similar to the

others, although the war emergency restricted its membership to persons who were

already in London. As background material it prepared sixty-two books and papers, of

which many are now published. Among these was World War; Its Cause and Cure by

Lionel Curtis. The committee on arrangements and agenda, with Lord Astor as chairman,

met in New York in January 1944. The delegations outside the United Kingdom were

made up of persons doing war duty in London, with a liberal mixture of Dominion

Rhodes Scholars. The chairmen of the various delegations included Professor K. H.

Bailey from Australia, E. J. Tarr from Canada, Sir Sardar E. Singh from India, W. P.

Morrell (whom we have already seen as a Beit Lecturer, a Rhodes Scholar, and a co-

editor with the Reverend K. N. Bell of All Souls), Professor S. H. Frankel from South

Africa, and Lord Hailey from the United Kingdom. There were also observers from

Burma and Southern Rhodesia. Of the fifty-three delegates, sixteen were from the United

Kingdom. Among these were Lord Hailey, Lionel Curtis, V. T. Harlow, Sir Frederick

Whyte, A. G. B. Fisher, John Coatman, Miss Kathleen Courtney, Viscount

Hinchingbrooke, A. Creech Jones, Sir Walter Layton, Sir Henry Price, Miss Heather

Harvey, and others. Of the total of fifty-three members, no more than five or six were of

the Milner Croup. The opening speech to the conference was made by Lord Robert Cecil,

and the Proceedings were published in the usual form under the editorship of Robert

Frost, research secretary of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and author of the

imperial sections of The History of the Times.

In all the various activities of the Milner Group in respect to Commonwealth affairs, it

is possible to discern a dualistic attitude. This attitude reveals a wholehearted public

acceptance of the existing constitutional and political relationships of Great Britain and

the Dominions, combined with an intense secret yearning for some form of closer union.

The realization that closer union was not politically feasible in a democratic age in which

the majority of persons, especially in the Dominions, rejected any effort to bind the

various parts of the Empire together explains this dualism. The members of the Group, as

The Round Table pointed out in 1919, were not convinced of the effectiveness or

workability of any program of Dominion relations based solely on cooperation without

any institutional basis, but publicly, and in the next breath, the Group wholeheartedly

embraced all the developments that destroyed one by one the legal and institutional links

which bound the Dominions to the mother country. In one special field after another—in

defense, economic cooperation, raw materials conservation, war graves, intellectual

cooperation, health measures, etc., etc.—the Group eagerly welcomed efforts to create

new institutional links between the self-governing portions of the Commonwealth. But all

the time the Group recognized that these innovations were unable to satisfy the yearning

that burned in the Group's collective heart. Only as the Second World War began to enter

its second, and more hopeful, half, did the Group begin once again to raise its voice with

suggestions for some more permanent organization of the constitutional side of

Commonwealth relations. All of these suggestions were offered in a timid and tentative

fashion, more or less publicly labeled as trial balloons and usually prefaced by an

engaging statement that the suggestion was the result of the personal and highly

imperfect ideas of the speaker himself. "Thinking aloud," as Smuts called it, became

epidemic among the members of the Group. These idle thoughts could be, thus, easily

repudiated if they fell on infertile or inhospitable ground, and even the individual whence

these suggestions emanated could hardly be held responsible for "thinking aloud." All of

these suggestions followed a similar pattern: (1) a reflection on the great crisis which the

Commonwealth survived in 1940-1942; (2) an indication that this crisis required some

reorganization of the Commonwealth in order to avoid its repetition; (3) a passage of high

praise for the existing structure of the Commonwealth and an emphatic statement that the

independence and autonomy of its various members is close to the speaker's heart and

that nothing he suggests must be taken as implying any desire to infringe in the slightest

degree on that independence; and (4) the suggestion itself emerges. The logical

incompatibility of the four sections of the pattern is never mentioned and if pointed out

by some critic would undoubtedly be excused on the grounds that the English are

practical rather than logical—an excuse behind which many English, even outside the

Milner Group, frequently find refuge.

We shall give three examples of the Milner Group's suggestions for Commonwealth

reform in the second half of the recent war. They emanated from General Smuts, Lord

Halifax, and Sir Edward Grigg. All of them were convinced that the British

Commonwealth would be drastically weaker in the postwar world and would require

internal reorganization in order to take its place as a balancing force between the two

great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Smuts, in an article in the

American weekly magazine Life for 28 December 1942, and in a speech before the

United Kingdom branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in London on 25

November 1943, was deliberately vague but hoped to use the close link between the

United Kingdom and the dependent colonies as a means of bringing the self-governing

Dominions closer to the United Kingdom by combining the Dominions with the colonies

in regional blocs. This plan had definite advantages, although it had been rejected as

impractical by Lionel Curtis in 1916. If regional blocs could be formed by dividing the

British Commonwealth into four or five geographic groupings, with a Dominion in each

region closely associated with the colonies in the same region, and if this could be done

without weakening the link between the United Kingdom and the colonies, it would serve

to strengthen the link between the United Kingdom and the Dominions. This latter goal

was frankly admitted by Smuts. He also suggested that a federated Western Europe be

included in the United Kingdom regional bloc.

Sir Edward Grigg's suggestion, made in his book The British Commonwealth,

appeared also in 1943. It was very similar to Smuts's, even to the use of the same verbal

expressions. For example, both spoke of the necessity for ending the "dual Empire," of

which one part was following a centralizing course and the other a decentralizing course.

This expression was derived from Lord Milner (and was attributed to this source by Sir

Edward) and referred to the difference between the dependent and the self-governing

portions of the Commonwealth. Sir Edward advocated creation of five regional blocs,

with Western Europe, associated by means of a military alliance with the United

Kingdom, in one. Without any sacrifice of sovereignty by anyone, he visualized the

creation of a regional council ("like a miniature Imperial Conference") and a joint

parliamentary assembly in three of these regions. The members of the council would be

representatives of legislatures and not of governments; the assembly would consist of

select members from the existing national parliaments in proper ratio; and each region

would have a permanent secretariat to carry out agreed decisions. How this elaborate

organization could be reconciled with the continuance of unrestricted national

sovereignty was not indicated.

Lord Halifax's suggestion, made in a speech before the Toronto Board of Trade on 24

January 1944, was somewhat different, although he clearly had the same goal in view and

the same mental picture of existing world conditions. He suggested that Britain could not

maintain her position as a great power, in the sense in which the United States and Russia

were great powers, on the basis of the strength of the United Kingdom alone.

Accordingly, he advocated the creation of some method of coordination of foreign policy

and measures of defense by which the Dominions could participate in both and a united

front could be offered to other powers.

That these trial balloons of Smuts, Grigg, and Halifax were not their isolated personal

reactions but were the results of a turmoil of thought within the Milner Group was

evident from the simultaneous suggestions which appeared in The Times editorials during

the first week in December 1943 and the issue of The Round Table for the same month.

The Winnipeg Free Press, a paper which has frequently shown knowledge of the

existence of the Milner Group, in editorials of 26 and 29 January 1944, pointed out this

effusion of suggestions for a reconstruction of the Empire and said:

“Added to the record of earlier statements, the Halifax speech affords conclusive

evidence that there is a powerful movement on foot in the United Kingdom for a

Commonwealth which will speak with a single voice. And it will be noted that Lord

Halifax believes that this change in the structure of the Commonwealth will be the first

consideration of the next Imperial Conference.... Running through all these speeches and

articles is the clear note of fear. The spokesmen are obsessed by the thought of power as

being the only force that counts. The world is to be governed by Leviathans.... It is tragic

that the sincere and powerful group of public men in England, represented by Lord

Halifax and Field Marshal Smuts, should react to the problem of maintaining peace in

this way.”

These suggestions were met by an uproar of protests that reached unnecessary heights

of denunciation, especially in Canada. They were rejected in South Africa, repulsed by

Mackenzie King and others in Canada, called "isolationist" by the CCF party, censured

unanimously by the Quebec Assembly, and repudiated by Prime Minister Churchill.

Except in New Zealand and Australia, where fear of Japan was having a profound effect

on public opinion, and in the United Kingdom, where the Milner Group's influence was

so extensive, the suggestions received a cold reception. In South Africa only The Cape

Times was favorable, and in Canada The Vancouver Province led a small band of

supporters. As a result, the Milner Group once again rejected any movement toward

closer union. It continued to toy with Grigg's idea of regional blocs within the

Commonwealth, but here it found an almost insoluble problem. If a regional bloc were to

be created in Africa, the natives of the African colonial areas would be exposed to the un-

tender mercies of the South African Boers, and it would be necessary to repudiate the

promises of native welfare which the Group had supported in the Kenya White Paper of

1923, its resistance to Boer influence in the three native protectorates in South Africa, the

implications in favor of native welfare in The African Survey of 1938, and the frequent

pronouncements of The Round Table on the paramount importance of protecting native

rights. Such a repudiation was highly unlikely, and indeed was specifically rejected by

Grigg himself in his book.(4)

The Milner Group itself had been one of the chief, if not the chief, forces in Britain

intensifying the decentralizing influences in the self-governing portions of the Empire.

This influence was most significant in regard to India, Palestine, Ireland, and Egypt, each

of which was separated from Great Britain by a process in which the Milner Group was a

principal agent. The first of these is so significant that it will be discussed in a separate

chapter, but a few words should be said about the other three here.

The Milner Group had relatively little to do with the affairs of Palestine except in the

early period (1915-1919), in the later period (the Peel Report of 1937), and in the fact that

the British influence on the Permanent Mandates Commission was always exercised

through a member of the Group.

The idea of establishing a mandate system for the territories taken from enemy powers

as a result of the war undoubtedly arose from the Milner Group's inner circle. It was first

suggested by George Louis Beer in a report submitted to the United States Government

on 1 January 1918, and by Lionel Curtis in an article called "Windows of Freedom" in

The Round Table for December 1918. Beer was a member of the Round Table Group

from about 1912 and was, in fact, the first member who was not a British subject. That

Beer was a member of the Group was revealed in the obituary published in The Round

Table for September 1920. The Group's attention was first attracted to Beer by a series of Anglophile studies on the British Empire in the eighteenth century which he published in

the period after 1893. A Germanophobe as well as an Anglophile, he intended by writing,

if we are to believe The Round Table, "to counteract the falsehoods about British

Colonial policy to be found in the manuals used in American primary schools." When the

Round Table Group, about 1911, began to study the causes of the American Revolution,

they wrote to Beer, and thus began a close and sympathetic relationship. He wrote the

reports on the United States in The Round Table for many years, and his influence is

clearly evident in Curtis's The Commonwealth of Nations. He gave a hint of the existence

of the Milner Group in an article which he wrote for the Political Science Quarterly of

June 1915 on Milner. He said: "He stands forth as the intellectual leader of the most

progressive school of imperial thought throughout the Empire." Beer was one of the chief

supporters of American intervention in the war against Germany in the period 1914-1917;

he was the chief expert on colonial questions on Colonel House's "Inquiry," which was

studying plans for the peace settlements; and he was the American expert on colonial

questions at the Peace Conference in Paris. The Milner Group was able to have him

named head of the Mandate Department of the League of Nations as soon as it was

established. He was one of the originators of the Royal Institute of International Affairs

in London and its American branch, The Council on Foreign Relations. With Lord

Eustace Percy, he drew up the plan for the History of the Peace Conference which was

carried out by Harold Temperley.

Curtis's suggestion for a mandates system was published in The Round Table after

discussions with Kerr and other members of the inner circle. It was read by Smuts before

it was printed and was used by the latter as the basis for his memorandum published in

December 1918 with the title The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion. This

embodied a constitution for the League of Nations in twenty-one articles. The first nine

of these dealt with the question of mandates. The mandates article of the final Covenant

of the League (Article 22) was drafted by Smuts and Kerr (according to Temperley) and

was introduced by Smuts to the League Commission of the Peace Conference. The

mandates themselves were granted under conditions drawn up by Lord Milner. Since it

was felt that this should be done on an international basis, the Milner drafts were not

accepted at once but were submitted to an international committee of five members

meeting in London. On this committee Milner was chairman and sole British member and

succeeded in having his drafts accepted.(5)

The execution of the terms of the mandates were under the supervision of a Permanent

Mandates Commission of nine members (later ten). The British member of this

commission was always of the Milner Group, as can be seen from the following list:

W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, February 1921-July 1923

Lord Lugard, July 1923-July 1936

Lord Hailey, September 1936-March 1939

Lord Hankey, May 1939-September 1939

Lord Hailey, September 1939

The origins and the supervision power of the mandates system were thus largely a

result of the activities of the Milner Group. This applied to Palestine as well as the other

mandates. Palestine, however, had a peculiar position among mandates because of the

Balfour Declaration of 1917, which states that Britain would regard with favor the

establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. This declaration, which is

always known as the Balfour Declaration, should rather be called "the Milner

Declaration," since Milner was the actual draftsman and was, apparently, its chief

supporter in the War Cabinet. This fact was not made public until 21 July 1937. At that

time Ormsby-Gore, speaking for the government in Commons, said, "The draft as

originally put up by Lord Balfour was not the final draft approved by the War Cabinet.

The particular draft assented to by the War Cabinet and afterwards by the Allied

Governments and by the United States . . . and finally embodied in the Mandate, happens

to have been drafted by Lord Milner. The actual final draft had to be issued in the name

of the Foreign Secretary, but the actual draftsman was Lord Milner." Milner had referred

to this fact in a typically indirect and modest fashion in the House of Lords on 27 June

1923, when he said, "I was a party to the Balfour Declaration." In the War Cabinet, at the

time, he received strong support from General Smuts.

Once the mandate was set up, also in terms drafted by Milner, the Milner Group took

little actual part in the administration of Palestine. None of the various high

commissioners was a member of the Group, and none of the various commissions

concerned with this problem possessed a member from the Group until the Peel

Commission of 1936. Reginald Coupland was one of the six members of the Peel

Commission and, according to unofficial information, was the chief author of its report.

In spite of this lack of direct contact with the subject, the Milner Group exercised a

certain amount of influence in regard to Palestine because of its general power in the

councils of the Conservative Party and because Palestine was administered through the

Colonial Office, where the Milner Group's influence was considerable.

The general attitude of the Milner Group was neither pro-Arab nor pro-Zionist,

although tending, if at all, toward the latter rather than the former. The Group were never

anti-Semitic, and not a shred of evidence in this direction has been found. In fact, they

were very sympathetic to the Jews and to their legitimate aspirations to overcome their

fate, but this feeling, it must be confessed, was rather general and remote, and they did

not, in their personal lives, have much real contact with Jews or any real appreciation of

the finer qualities of those people. Their feeling against anti-Semitism was, on the whole,

remote and academic. On the other hand, as with most upper-class English, their feeling

for the Arabs was somewhat more personal. Many members of the Group had been in

Arab countries, found their personal relationships with the Arabs enjoyable, and were

attracted to them. However, this attraction of the Arabs never inclined the Milner Group

toward that pro-Arab romanticism that was to be found in people like W. S. Blunt or T.

E. Lawrence. The reluctance of the Milner Group to push the Zionist cause in Palestine

was based on more academic considerations, chiefly two in number: (1) the feeling that it

would not be fair to allow the bustling minority of Zionists to come into Palestine and

drive the Arabs either out or into an inferior economic and social position; and (2) the

feeling that to do this would have the effect of alienating the Arabs from Western, and

especially British, culture, and that this would be especially likely to occur if the Jews

obtained control of the Mediterranean coast from Egypt to Syria. Strangely enough, there

is little evidence that the Milner Group was activated by strategic or economic

considerations at all. Thus the widely disseminated charges that Britain failed to support

Zionism in Palestine because of anti-Semitism or strategic and economic considerations

is not supported by any evidence found within the Milner Group. This may be true of

other sections of British public opinion, and certainly is true of the British Labour Party,

where the existence of anti-Semitism as an influence seems clearly established.

In Palestine, as in India and probably in Ireland, the policy of the Milner Group seems

to have been motivated by good intentions which alienated the contending parties,

encouraged extremism, and weakened British influence with both. In the long run, this

policy was pro-Arab, just as in India it was pro-Moslem, and in both cases it served to

encourage an uncompromising obstructionism which could have been avoided if Britain

had merely applied the principles to which she stood committed.

The attitude of the Milner Group toward the Arabs and Jews can be seen from some

quotations from members of the Group. At the Peace Conference of 1919, discussing the

relative merits of the Jews and Arabs, Smuts said: "They haven't the Arabs' attractive

manners. They do not warm the heart by graceful subjection. They make demands. They

are a bitter, recalcitrant little people, and, like the Boers, impatient of leadership and

ruinously quarrelsome among themselves. They see God in the shape of an Oriental

potentate." A few years later, John Dove, in a letter to Brand, asked himself why there

was so much pro-Arab feeling among the British, especially "the public school caste,"

and attributed it to the Arabs' good manners, derived from desert life, and their love for

sports, especially riding and shooting, both close to the heart of the public-school boy. A

little later, in another letter, also written from Palestine, Dove declared that the whole

Arab world should be in one state and it must have Syria and Palestine for its front door,

not be like South Africa, with Delagoa Bay in other hands. The Arab world, he explained,

needs this western door because we are trying to westernize the Arabs, and without it

they would be driven to the east and to India, which they hate. He concluded:

“If the Arab belongs to the Mediterranean, as T. E. Lawrence insists, we should do

nothing to stop him getting back to it. Why our own nostrum for the ills of mankind

everywhere is Western Civilization, and, if it is a sound one, what would be the good of

forcing a people who want direct contact with us to slink in and out of their country by a

back door which, like the Persian Gulf, opens only on the East? It would certainly check

development, if it did not actually warp it. I suggest then that partition should not be

permanent, but this does not mean that a stage of friendly tutelage is necessarily a bad

thing for the Arabs. On the contrary, advanced peoples can give so much to stimulate

backward ones if they do it with judgment and sympathy. Above all, it must not be the

kind of help which kills individuality.... Personally, I don't see the slightest harm in Jews

coming to Palestine under reasonable conditions. They are the Arabs' cousins as much as

the Phoenicians, and if Zionism brings capital and labour which will enable industries to

start, it will add to the strength of the larger unit which some day is going to include

Palestine. But they must be content to be part of such a potential unit. They need have no

fear of absorption, for they have everything to gain from an Arab Federation. It would

mean a far larger field for their activities.”

The attitude of the Milner Group toward the specific problem of Zionism was

expressed in explicit terms by Lord Milner himself in a speech in the House of Lords on

27 June 1923. After expressing his wholehearted agreement with the policy of the British

government as revealed in its actions and in its statements, like the Balfour Declaration

and the White Paper of 1922 (Cmd. 1700), he added:

“I am not speaking of the policy which is advocated by the extreme Zionists, which is

a totally different thing.... I believe that we have only to go on steadily with the policy of

the Balfour Declaration as we have ourselves interpreted it in order to see great material

progress in Palestine and a gradual subsistence of the present [Arab] agitation, the force

of which it would be foolish to deny, but which I believe to be largely due to artificial

stimulus and, to a very great extent, to be excited from without. The symptoms of any

real and general dissatisfaction among the mass of the Arab population with the

conditions under which they live, I think it would be very difficult to discover.... There is

plenty of room in that country for a considerable immigrant population without injuring

in any way the resident Arab population, and, indeed, in many ways it would tend to their

extreme benefit.... There are about 700,000 people in Palestine, and there is room for

several millions.... I am and always have been a strong supporter of the pro-Arab policy

which was first advocated in this country in the course of the war. I believe in the

independence of the Arab countries, which they owe to us and which they can only

maintain with our help. I look forward to an Arab Federation.... I am convinced that the

Arab will make a great mistake . . . in claiming Palestine as a part of the Arab Federation

in the same sense as are the other countries of the Near East which are mainly inhabited

by Arabs.”

He then went on to say that he felt that Palestine would require a permanent mandate

and under that condition could become a National Home for the Jews, could take as many

Jewish immigrants as the country could economically support, but "must never become a

Jewish state. "

This was the point of view of the Milner Group, and it remained the point of view of

the British government until 1939. Like the Milner Group's point of view on other issues,

it was essentially fair, compromising, and well-intentioned. It broke down in Palestine

because of the obstructionism of the Arabs; the intention of the Zionists to have political

control of their National Home, if they got one; the pressure on both Jews and Arabs

from the world depression after 1929; and the need for a refuge from Hitler for European

Jews after 1933. The Milner Group did not approve of the efforts of the Labour

government in 1929-1931 to curtail Zionist rights in Palestine. They protested vigorously

against the famous White Paper of 1930 (Cmd. 3692), which was regarded as anti-

Zionist. Baldwin, Austen Chamberlain, and Leopold Amery protested against the

document in a letter to The Times on 30 October 1930. Smuts sent a telegram of protest to

the Prime Minister, and Sir John Simon declared it a violation of the mandate in a letter

to The Times. Seven years later, the report of the Peel Commission said that the White

Paper "betrayed a marked insensitiveness to Jewish feelings." As a result of this pressure,

Ramsay MacDonald wrote a letter to Dr. Weizmann, interpreting the document in a more

moderate fashion.

As might be expected, in view of the position of Reginald Coupland on the Peel

Commission, the report of that Commission met with a most enthusiastic reception from

the Milner Group. This report was a scholarly study of conditions in Palestine, of a type

usually found in any document with which the Milner Group had direct contact. For the

first time in any government document, the aspirations of Jews and Arabs in Palestine

were declared to be irreconcilable and the existing mandate unworkable. Accordingly, the

report recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a

neutral enclave containing the Holy Places. This suggestion was accepted by the British

government in a White Paper (Cmd. 5513) issued through Ormsby-Gore. He also

defended it before the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. In the

House of Lords it was defended by Lord Lugard, but recently retired as the British

member of the Permanent Mandates Commission. It was also supported by Lord Dufferin

and Archbishop Lang. In the House of Commons the motion to approve the government's

policy as outlined in the White Paper Cmd. 5513 was introduced by Ormsby-Gore. The

first speech in support of the motion, which was passed without a division, was from

Leopold Amery.

Amery's speech in support of this motion is extremely interesting and is actually an

evolution, under the pressure of hard facts, from the point of view described by Lord

Milner in 1923. Amery said: "However much we may regret it, we have lost the situation

in Palestine, as we lost it in Ireland, through a lack of wholehearted faith in ourselves and

through the constitutional inability of the individual Briton, and indeed of the country as

a whole, not to see the other fellow's point of view and to be influenced by it, even to the

detriment of any consistent policy." According to Amery, the idea of partition occurred to

the Peel Commission only after it had left Palestine and the report was already written.

Thus the commission was unable to hear any direct evidence on this question or make

any examination of how partition should be carried out in detail. He said:

“Of the 396 pages of the Report almost the whole of the first 368 pages, including the

whole of chapters 7 to 19, represent an earlier Report of an entirely different character.

That earlier Report envisaged the continuation of the Mandate in its present form....

Throughout all these chapters to which I have referred, the whole text of the chapters

deals with the assumption that the Mandate is continued, but here and there, at the end of

some chapter, there is tacked on in a quite obviously added last paragraph, something to

this effect: "All the rest of the chapter before is something that might have been

considered if, as a matter of fact, we were not going to pursue an entirely different

policy." These last paragraphs were obviously added by the Secretary, or whoever helped

draft the Report, after the main great conclusion was reached at a very late stage.”

Since the Milner Group supported partition in Palestine, as they had earlier in Ireland

and as they did later in India, it is not too much to believe that Coupland added the

additional paragraphs after the commission had returned to England and he had had an

opportunity to discuss the matter with other members of the inner circle. In fact, Amery's

remarks were probably based on knowledge rather than internal textual evidence and

were aimed to get the motion accepted, with the understanding that it approved no more

than the principle of partition, with the details to be examined by another commission

later. This, in fact, is what was done.

Amery's speech is also interesting for its friendly reference to the Jews. He said that in

the past the Arabs had obtained 100 percent of what they were promised, while the Jews

had received "a raw deal," in spite of the fact that the Jews had a much greater need of the

country and would make the best use of the land.

To carry out the policy of partition, the government appointed a new royal

commission of four members in March 1938. Known as the Woodhead Commission, this

body had no members of either the Milner Group or the Cecil Bloc on it, and its report

(Cmd. 5854) rejected partition as impractical on the grounds that any acceptable method

of partition into two states would give a Jewish state with an annual financial surplus and

an Arab state with an annual financial deficit. This conclusion was accepted by the

government in another White Paper (Cmd. 5893 of 1938). As an alternative, the

government called a Round Table Conference of Jews and Arabs from Palestine along

with representatives of the Arab states outside of Palestine. During all this, the Arabs had

been growing increasingly violent; they refused to accept the Peel Report; they boycotted

the Woodhead Commission; and they finally broke into open civil war. In such

conditions, nothing was accomplished at the Round Table meetings at London in

February-March 1939. The Arab delegation included leaders who had to be released from

prison in order to come and who refused to sit in the same conference with the Jews.

Compromise proposals presented by the government were rejected by both sides.

After the conference broke up, the government issued a new statement of policy

(Cmd. 6019 of May 1939). It was a drastic reversal of previous statements and was

obviously a turn in favor of the Arabs. It fixed Jewish immigration into Palestine at

75,000 for the whole of the next five years (including illegal immigration) and gave the

Arabs a veto on any Jewish immigration after the five-year period was finished. As a

matter of principle, it shifted the basis for Jewish immigration from the older criterion of

the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine to the political absorptive capacity. This

was really an invitation to the Arabs to intensify their agitation and constituted a vital

blow at the Jews, since it was generally conceded that Jewish immigration increased the

economic absorptive capacity for both Jews and Arabs.

The Milner Group were divided on this concrete policy. In general, they continued to

believe that the proper solution to the Zionist problem could be found in a partitioned

Palestine within a federation of Arab states. The Round Table offered this as its program

in March 1939 and repeated it in June of the same year. But on the issue of an immediate

and concrete policy, the Group was split. It is highly unlikely that this split originated

with the issue of Zionism. It was, rather, a reflection of the more fundamental split within

the Group, between those, like Amery and Salter, who abandoned the appeasement policy

in March 1939 and those, like the Astors and Lothian, who continued to pursue it in a

modified form.

The change in the policy of the government resulted in a full debate in the House of

Commons. This debate, and the resulting division, revealed the split within the Milner

Group. The policy of the White Paper was denounced by Amery as a betrayal of the Jews

and of the mandate, as the final step in a scaling down of Jewish hopes that began in

1922, as a yielding of principle to Arab terrorists, as invalid without the approval of the

League of Nations, and as unworkable because the Jews would and could resist it. The

speeches for the government from Malcolm MacDonald and R. A. Butler were weak and

vague. In the division, the government won approval of the White Paper by 268 to 179,

with Major Astor, Nancy Astor, Hoare, Simon, Malcolm MacDonald, and Sir Donald

Somervell in the majority and Amery, Noel-Baker, and Arthur Salter in the minority. On

the same day, a similar motion in the House of Lords was approved without a division.

The government at once began to put the White Paper policy into effect, without

waiting for the approval of the Permanent Mandates Commission. In July 1939 rumors

began to circulate that this body had disapproved of the policy, and questions were asked

in the House of Commons, but MacDonald evaded the issue, refused to give information

which he possessed, and announced that the government would take the issue to the

Council of the League. As the Council meeting was canceled by the outbreak of war, this

could not be done, but within a week of the announcement the minutes of the Permanent

Mandates Commission were released. They showed that the commission had, by

unanimous vote, decided that the policy of the White Paper was contrary to the accepted

interpretations of the mandate, and, by a vote of 4-3, that the White Paper was

inconsistent with the mandate under any possible interpretation. In this last vote Hankey,

at his first session of the commission, voted in the minority.

As a result of the release of this information, a considerable section of the House was

disturbed by the government's high-handed actions and by the Colonial Secretary's

evasive answers in July 1939. In March 1940, Noel-Baker introduced a motion of censure

on this issue. The motion did not go to a division, but Amery once again objected to the

new policy and to inviting representatives of the Arab states to the abortive Round Table

Conference of 1939. He called the presence of agents of the Mufti at the Round Table

"surrender."

By this time the Milner Group was badly shattered on other issues than Palestine.

Within two months of this debate, it was reunited on the issue of all-out war against

Germany, and Amery had resumed a seat in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for India.

The Palestine issue declined in importance and did not revive to any extent until the

Labour government of 1945 had taken office. From that time on the members of the

Milner Group were united again on the issue, objecting to the Labour government's anti-

Jewish policy and generally following the line Amery had laid down in 1939. In fact, it

was Amery who did much of the talking in 1946-1949, but this is not strictly part of our

story.

In Irish affairs, the Milner Group played a much more decisive role than in Palestine

affairs, although only for the brief period from 1917 to 1925. Previous to 1917 and going

back to 1887, Irish affairs had been one of the most immediate concerns of the Cecil

Bloc. A nephew of Lord Salisbury was Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887-1891, another

nephew held the post in 1895-1900, and the private secretary and protege of the former

held the post in 1900-1905. The Cecil Bloc had always been opposed to Home Rule for

Ireland, and when, in 1912-1914, the Liberal government took steps to grant Home Rule,

Sir Edward Carson took the lead in opposing these steps. Carson was a creation of the

Cecil Bloc, a fact admitted by Balfour in 1929, when he told his niece, "I made Carson."

Balfour found Carson a simple Dublin barrister in 1887, when he went to Ireland as Chief

Secretary. He made Carson one of his chief prosecuting attorneys in 1887, an M.P. for

Dublin University in 1892, and Solicitor General in his own government in 1900-1906.

When the Home Rule Bill of 1914 was about to pass, Carson organized a private army,

known as the Ulster Volunteers, armed them with guns smuggled in from Germany, and

formed a plot to seize control of Belfast at a given signal from him. This signal, in the

form of a code telegram, was written in 1914 and on its way to be dispatched by Carson

when he received word from Asquith that war with Germany was inevitable.

Accordingly, the revolt was canceled and the date on which the Home Rule Bill was to

go into effect was postponed by special act of Parliament until six months after peace

should be signed.

The information about the telegram of 1914 was revealed to Lionel Curtis by Carson

in a personal conversation after war began. Curtis's attitude was quite different, and he

thoroughly disapproved of Carson's plot. This difference is an indication of the difference

in point of view in regard to Ireland between the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc. The

latter was willing to oppose Home Rule even to the point where it would condone illegal

actions; the former, on the contrary, was in favor of Home Rule because it believed that

Ireland would aid Britain's enemies in every crisis and leave the Commonwealth at the

first opportunity unless it were given freedom to govern itself.

The Milner Group's attitude toward the Irish question was expressed by The Round

Table in a retrospective article in the September 1935 issue in the following words:

“The root principle of The Round Table remained freedom—'the government of men

by themselves"—and it demanded that within the Empire this principle should be

persistently pursued and expressed in institutions. For that reason it denounced the post-

war attempt to repress the Irish demand for national self-government by ruthless violence

after a century of union had failed to win Irish consent, as a policy in conflict with British

institutions and inconsistent with the principle of the British Commonwealth; and it

played its part in achieving the Irish Treaty and the Dominion settlement.”

The part which the Group played in the Irish settlement was considerably more than

this brief passage might indicate, but it could not take effect until the group in Britain

advocating repression and the group in Ireland advocating separation from the crown had

brought each other to some realization of the advantages of compromise.

These advantages were pointed out by the Group, especially by Lionel Curtis, who

began a two-year term as editor of The Round Table immediately after his great triumph

in the Government of India Act of 1919. In the March 1920 issue, for example, he

discussed and approved a project, first announced by Lloyd George in December 1919, to

separate northern and southern Ireland and give self-government to both as autonomous

parts of Great Britain. This was really nothing but an application of the principle of

devolution, whose attractiveness to the Milner Group has already been mentioned.

The Irish Settlement in the period 1920-1923 is very largely a Milner Group

achievement. For most of this period Amery's brother-in-law, Hamar Greenwood

(Viscount Greenwood since 1937), was Chief Secretary for Ireland. He was, indeed, the

last person to hold this office before it was abolished at the end of 1922. Curtis was

adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office in 1921-1924, and Smuts and Feetham

intervened in the affair at certain points.

A settlement of the Irish problem along lines similar to those advocated by The Round

Table was enacted in the Government of Ireland Act of December 1920. Drafted by H. A.

L. Fisher and piloted through Commons by him, it passed the critical second reading by a

vote of 348-94. In the majority were Amery, Nancy Astor, Austen Chamberlain, H. A. L.

Fisher, Hamar Greenwood, Samuel Hoare, G. R. Lane-Fox (brother-in-law of Lord

Halifax), and E. F. L. Wood (Lord Halifax). In the minority were Lord Robert Cecil and

Lord Wolmer (son of Lord Selborne). In the House of Lords the bill passed by 164-75. In

the majority were Lords Curzon, Lytton, Onslow (brother-in-law of Lord Halifax),

Goschen, Hampden (brother of Robert Brand), Hardinge, Milner, Desborough, Ernle,

Meston, Monson, Phillimore, Riddell, and Wemyss. In the minority were Lords

Linlithgow, Beauchamp (father-in-law of Samuel Hoare), Midleton, Bryce, Ampthill

(brother-in-law of Samuel Hoare), and Leconfield (brother of Hugh Wyndham).

The act of 1920 never went into effect because the extremists on both sides were not

yet satiated with blood. By June 1921 they were. The first movement in this direction,

according to W. K. Hancock, "may be said to open as early as October 1920 when The

Times published suggestions for a truce and negotiations between plenipotentiaries of

both sides." The same authority lists ten voices as being raised in protest at British

methods of repression. Three of these were of the Milner Group ( The Times, The Round

Table, and Sir John Simon). He quotes The Round Table as saying: "If the British

Commonwealth can only be preserved by such means, it would become a negation of the

principle for which it has stood."(6) Similar arguments were brought to bear on the Irish

leaders by Jan Smuts.

Smuts left South Africa for England at the end of May 1921, to attend the Imperial

Conference of that year, which was to open on a Monday. He arrived in England the

preceding Saturday and went to Oxford to stay with friends of the Milner Group. In the

evening he attended a Rhodes dinner, which means he saw more of the Group. The

following day, he was called by the King to Windsor Castle and went immediately. The

King told Smuts that he was going to make a speech at the opening of the new Ulster

Parliament. He asked Smuts to write down suggestions for this speech. Smuts stayed the

night at Windsor

Castle, drafted a speech, and gave it to the King's private secretary. The sequel can

best be told in Smuts's own words as recorded in the second volume of S. G. Millin's

biography: "The next day Lloyd George invited me to attend a committee meeting of the

Cabinet, to give my opinion of the King's speech. And what should this King's speech

turn out to be but a typewritten copy of the draft I had myself written the night before. I

found them working on it. Nothing was said about my being the author. They innocently

consulted me and I innocently answered them. But imagine the interesting position. Well,

they toned the thing down a bit, they made a few minor alterations, but in substance the

speech the King delivered next week in Belfast was the one I prepared.” (7) Needless to

say, this speech was conciliatory.

Shortly afterward, Tom Casement, brother of Sir Roger Casement, who had been

executed by the British in 1916, opened negotiations between Smuts and the Irish leaders

in Dublin. Tom Casement was an old friend of Smuts, for he had been British Consul at

Delagoa Bay in 1914 and served with Smuts in East Africa in 1916-1917. As a result,

Smuts went to Ireland in June 1921 under an alias and was taken to the hiding place of

the rebels. He tried to persuade them that they would be much better off with Dominion

status within the British Commonwealth than as a republic, offering as an example the

insecure position of the Transvaal before 1895 in contrast with its happy condition after

1909. He said in conclusion, "Make no mistake about it, you have more privilege, more

power, more peace, more security in such a sisterhood of equal nations than in a small,

nervous republic having all the time to rely on goodwill, and perhaps the assistance, of

foreigners. What sort of independence do you call that? By comparison with real

independence it is a shadow. You sell the fact for the name." Smuts felt that his argument

was having an effect on Arthur Griffith and some others, but de Valera remained

suspicious, and Erskine Childers was "positively hostile." Nevertheless, the Irish decided

to open negotiations with London, and Smuts promised to arrange an armistice. The

armistice went into effect on 11 July 1921, and three days later the conference began.

The Irish Conference of 1921 was held in two sessions: a week in July and a series of

meetings from 11 October to 6 December 1921. The secretary to the conference was

Lionel Curtis, who resigned his editorship of The Round Table for the purpose and

remained as chief adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office for the next three years.

As a result of the conference, the Irish moderates negotiated the Articles of Agreement of

6 December 1921. De Valera had refused to form part of the Irish delegation at the

second session of the conference, and refused to accept Dominion status, although Smuts

begged him to do so in a letter published in The Times on 15 August.

As a result of the Articles of Agreement of December 1921 and the Irish Free State

Act of March 1922, Southern Ireland became an independent Dominion within the

British Commonwealth. Its boundary with Northern Ireland was to be settled by a

Boundary Commission of three members representing the three interested parties. On this

commission, Richard Feetham of the Milner Group was the British member and also

chairman.

The subsequent revolt of de Valera and the Irish Republicans against the Free State

government, and the ultimate victory of their ideas, is not part of our story. It was a

development which the Milner Group were powerless to prevent. They continued to

believe that the Irish, like others, could be bound to Britain by invisible ties if all visible

ones were destroyed. This extraordinary belief, admirable as it was, had its basis in a

profoundly Christian outlook and, like appeasement of Hitler, self-government for India,

or the Statute of Westminister, had its ultimate roots in the Sermon on the Mount.

Unfortunately, such Christian tactics were acutely dangerous in a non-Christian world,

and in this respect the Irish were only moderately different from Hitler.

The Milner Group's reward for their concessions to Ireland was not to be obtained in

this world. This became clear during the Second World War, when the inability of the

British to use Irish naval bases against German submarines had fatal consequences for

many gallant British seamen. These bases had been retained for Britain as a result of the

agreement of 1922 but were surrendered to the Irish on 25 April 1938, just when Hitler's

threat to Britain was becoming acute. The Round Table of June 1938 welcomed this

surrender, saying: "The defence of the Irish coast, as John Redmond vainly urged in

1914, should be primarily a matter for Irishmen."

As the official links between Eire and Britain were slowly severed, the Croup made

every effort to continue unofficial relationships such as those through the Irish Institute of

International Affairs and the unofficial British Commonwealth relations conference,

which had Irish members in 1938.

The relationships of Britain with Egypt were also affected by the activity of the Milner

Group. The details need not detain us long. It is sufficient to state that the Egyptian

Declaration of 1922 was the result of the personal negotiations of Lord Milner in Egypt

in his capacity as Colonial Secretary. In this post his Permanent Under Secretary was Sir

George Fiddes of the Kindergarten, his Parliamentary Under Secretary was Amery, and

his chief adviser in Egypt was M. S. O. Walrond, also of the Kindergarten.

Without going into the very extensive influence which members of the Milner Group

have had on other parts of the Commonwealth (especially tropical Africa), it must be

clear that, however unsatisfactory Commonwealth relations may be to the Group now,

they nevertheless were among the chief creators of the existing system. This will appear

even more clearly when we examine their influence in the history of India.

Chapter 10—The Royal Institute of International Affairs

The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) is nothing but the Milner Group

"writ large." It was founded by the Group, has been consistently controlled by the Group,

and to this day is the Milner Group in its widest aspect. It is the legitimate child of the

Round Table organization, just as the latter was the legitimate child of the "Closer

Union" movement organized in South Africa in 1907. All three of these organizations

were formed by the same small group of persons, all three received their initial financial

backing from Sir Abe Bailey, and all three used the same methods for working out and

propagating their ideas (the so-called Round Table method of discussion groups plus a

journal). This similarity is not an accident. The new organization was intended to be a

wider aspect of the Milner Group, the plan being to influence the leaders of thought

through The Round Table and to influence a wider group through the RIIA.

The real founder of the Institute was Lionel Curtis, although this fact was concealed

for many years and he was presented to the public as merely one among a number of

founders. In more recent years, however, the fact that Curtis was the real founder of the

Institute has been publicly stated by members of the Institute and by the Institute itself on

many occasions, and never denied. One example will suffice. In the Annual Report of the

Institute for 1942-1943 we read the following sentence: "When the Institute was founded

through the inspiration of Mr. Lionel Curtis during the Peace Conference of Paris in

1919, those associated with him in laying the foundations were a group of comparatively

young men and women."

The Institute was organized at a joint conference of British and American experts at

the Hotel Majestic on 30 May 1919. At the suggestion of Lord Robert Cecil, the chair

was given to General Tasker Bliss of the American delegation. We have already indicated

that the experts of the British delegation at the Peace Conference were almost exclusively

from the Milner Group and Cecil Bloc. The American group of experts, "the Inquiry,"

was manned almost as completely by persons from institutions (including universities)

dominated by J. P. Morgan and Company. This was not an accident. Moreover, the

Milner Group has always had very close relationships with the associates of J. P. Morgan

and with the various branches of the Carnegie Trust. These relationships, which are

merely examples of the closely knit ramifications of international financial capitalism,

were probably based on the financial holdings controlled by the Milner Group through

the Rhodes Trust. The term "international financier" can be applied with full justice to

several members of the Milner Group inner circle, such as Brand, Hichens, and above all,

Milner himself.

At the meeting at the Hotel Majestic, the British group included Lionel Curtis, Philip

Kerr, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Eustace Percy, Sir Eyre Crowe, Sir Cecil Hurst, J. W.

Headlam-Morley, Geoffrey Dawson, Harold Temperley, and G. M. Gathorne-Hardy. It

was decided to found a permanent organization for the study of international affairs and

to begin by writing a history of the Peace Conference. A committee was set up to

supervise the writing of this work. It had Lord Meston as chairman, Lionel Curtis as

secretary, and was financed by a gift of £2000 from Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan

and Company. This group picked Harold Temperley as editor of the work. It appeared in

six large volumes in the years 1920-1924, under the auspices of the RIIA.

The British organization was set up by a committee of which Lord Robert Cecil was

chairman, Lionel Curtis was honorary secretary and the following were members: Lord

Eustace Percy, J. A. C. (later Sir John) Tilley, Philip Noel-Baker, Clement Jones, Harold

Temperley, A. L. Smith (classmate of Milner and Master of Balliol), George W.

Prothero, and Geoffrey Dawson. This group drew up a constitution and made a list of

prospective members. Lionel Curtis and Gathorne Hardy drew up the by-laws.

The above description is based on the official history of the RIIA published by the

Institute itself in 1937 and written by Stephen King Hall. It does not agree in its details

(committees and names) with information from other sources, equally authoritative, such

as the journal of the Institute or the preface to Temperley's History of the Peace

Conference. The latter, for example, says that the members were chosen by a committee

consisting of Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Valentine Chirol, and Sir Cecil Hurst. As a matter of

fact, all of these differing accounts are correct, for the Institute was formed in such an

informal fashion, as among friends, that membership on committees and lines of

authority between committees were not very important. As an example, Mr. King-Hall

says that he was invited to join the Institute in 1919 by Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian),

although this name is not to be found on any membership committee. At any rate, one

thing is clear: The Institute was formed by the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group, acting

together, and the real decisions were being made by members of the latter.

As organized, the Institute consisted of a council with a chairman and two honorary

secretaries, and a small group of paid employees. Among these latter, A. J. Toynbee,

nephew of Milner's old friend at Balliol, was the most important. There were about 300

members in 1920, 714 in 1922, 17D7 in 1929, and 2414 in 1936. There have been three

chairmen of the council: Lord Meston in 1920-1926, Major-General Sir Neill Malcolm in

1926-1935, and Lord Astor from 1935 to the present. All of these are members of the

Milner Group, although General Malcolm is not yet familiar to us.

General Malcolm, from Eton and Sandhurst, married the sister of Dougal Malcolm of

Milner's Kindergarten in 1907, when he was a captain in the British Army. By 1916 he

was a lieutenant colonel and two years later a major general. He was with the British

Military Mission in Berlin in 1919-1921 and General Officer Commanding in Malaya in

1921-1924, retiring in 1924. He was High Commissioner for German Refugees (a project

in which the Milner Group was deeply involved) in 1936-1938 and has been associated

with a number of industrial and commercial firms, including the British North Borneo

Company, of which he is president and Dougal Malcolm is vice-president. It must not be

assumed that General Malcolm won advancement in the world because of his connections

with the Milner Group, for his older brother, Sir Ian Malcolm was an important member

of the Cecil Bloc long before Sir Neill joined the Milner Group. Sir Ian, who went to

Eton and New College, was assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury in 1895-1900,

was parliamentary private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland (George

Wyndham) in 1901-1903, and was private secretary to Balfour in the United States in

1917 and at the Peace Conference in 1919. He wrote the sketch of Walter Long of the

Cecil Bloc (Lord Long of Wraxall) in the Dictionary of National Biography.

From the beginning, the two honorary secretaries of the Institute were Lionel Curtis

and G. M. Gathorne-Hardy. These two, especially the latter, did much of the active work

of running the organization. In 1926 the Report of the Council of the RIIA said: "It is not too much to say that the very existence of the Institute is due to those who have served as

Honorary Officers." The burden of work was so great on Curtis and Gathorne-Hardy by

1926 that Sir Otto Beit, of the Rhodes Trust, Milner Group, and British South Africa

Company, gave £1000 for 1926 and 1927 for secretarial assistance. F. B. Bourdillon

assumed the task of providing this assistance in March 1926. He had been secretary to

Feetham on the Irish Boundary Commission in 1924-1925 and a member of the British

delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919. He has been in the Research Department of

the Foreign Office since 1943.

The active governing body of the Institute is the council, originally called the

executive committee. Under the more recent name, it generally had twenty-five to thirty

members, of whom slightly less than half were usually of the Milner Group. In 1923, five

members were elected, including Lord Meston, Headlam-Morley, and Mrs. Alfred

Lyttelton. The following year, seven were elected, including Wilson Harris, Philip Kerr,

and Sir Neill Malcolm. And so it went. In 1936, at least eleven out of twenty-six

members of the council were of the Milner Group. These included Lord Astor

(chairman), L. Curtis, G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, Lord Hailey, H. D. Henderson, Stephen

King-Hall, Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Sir Neill Malcolm, Lord Meston, Sir Arthur Salter, J.

W. Wheeler-Bennett, E. L. Woodward, and Sir Alfred Zimmern. Among the others were

A. V. Alexander, Sir John Power, Sir Norman Angell, Clement Jones, Lord Lytton,

Harold Nicolson, Lord Snell, and C. K. Webster. Others who were on the council at

various times were E. H. Carr, Harold Butler, G. N. Clark, Geoffrey Crowther, H. V.

Hodson, Hugh Wyndham, G. W. A. Ormsley-Gore, Walter Layton, Austen Chamberlain,

Malcolm MacDonald (elected 1933), and many other members of the Group.

The chief activities of the RIIA were the holding of discussion meetings, the

organization of study groups, the sponsoring of research, and the publication of

information and materials based on these. At the first meeting, Sir Maurice Hankey read a

paper on "Diplomacy by Conference," showing how the League of Nations grew out of

the Imperial Conferences. This was published in The Round Table. No complete record

exists of the meetings before the fall of 1921, but, beginning then, the principal speech at

each meeting and resumes of the comments from the floor were published in the Journal.

At the first of these recorded meetings, D. G. Hogarth spoke on "The Arab States," with

Lord Chelmsford in the chair. Stanley Reed, Chirol, and Meston spoke from the floor.

Two weeks later, H. A. L. Fisher spoke on "The Second Assembly of the League of

Nations," with Lord Robert Cecil in the chair. Temperley and Wilson Harris also spoke.

In November, Philip Kerr was the chief figure for two evenings on "Pacific Problems as

They Would Be submitted to the Washington Conference." At the end of the same

month, A. J. Toynbee spoke on "The Greco-Turkish Question," with Sir Arthur Evans in

the chair, and early in December his father-in-law, Gilbert Murray, spoke on "Self-

Determination," with Lord Sumner in the chair. In January 1922, Chaim Weizmann

spoke on "Zionism"; in February, Chirol spoke on "Egypt"; in April, Walter T. Layton

spoke on "The Financial Achievement of the League of Nations," with Lord Robert Cecil

in the chair. In June, Wilson Harris spoke on "The Genoa Conference," with Robert H.

Brand in the chair. In October, Ormsby-Gore spoke on "Mandates," with Lord Lugard in

the chair. Two weeks later, Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland spoke on "The League of Nations,"

with H. A. L. Fisher in the chair. In March 1923, Harold Butler spoke on the

"International Labour Office," with G. N. Barnes in the chair. Two weeks later, Philip

Kerr spoke on "The Political Situation in the United States," with Arthur Balfour in the

chair. In October 1923, Edward F. L. Wood (Lord Halifax) spoke on "The League of

Nations," with H. A. L. Fisher in the chair. In November 1924, E. R. Peacock (Parkin's

protege) spoke on "Mexico," with Lord Eustace Percy in the chair. In October 1925,

Leopold Amery spoke on "The League of Nations," with Robert Cecil as chairman, while

in May 1926, H. A. L. Fisher spoke on the same subject, with Neill Malcolm as

chairman. In November 1925, Paul Mantoux spoke on "The Procedure of the League,"

with Brand as chairman. In June 1923, Edward Grigg spoke on "Egypt," with D. G.

Hogarth in the chair. In the season of 1933-1934 the speakers included Ormsby-Gore,

Oliver Lyttelton, Edward Grigg, Donald Somervell, Toynbee, Zimmern, R. W. Seton-

Watson, and Lord Lothian. In the season of 1938-1939 the list contains the names of

Wilson Harris, C. A. Macartney, Toynbee, Lord Hailey, A. G. B. Fisher, Harold Butler,

Curtis, Lord Lothian, Zimmern, Lionel Hichens, and Lord Halifax. These rather scattered

observations will show how the meetings were peppered by members of the Milner

Group. This does not mean that the Group monopolized the meetings, or even spoke at a

majority of them. The meetings generally took place once a week from October to June

of each year, and probably members of the Group spoke or presided at no more than a

quarter of them. This, however, represents far more than their due proportion, for when

the Institute had 2500, members the Milner Group amounted to no more than 100.

The proceedings of the meetings were generally printed in abbreviated form in the

Journal of the Institute. Until January 1927, this periodical was available only to

members, but since that date it has been open to public subscription. The first issue was

as anonymous as the first issue of The Round Table: no list of editors, no address, and no

signature to the opening editorial introducing the new journal. The articles, however, had

the names of the speakers indicated. When it went on public sale in January 1927, the

name of the Institute was added to the cover. In time it took the name International

Affairs. The first editor, we learn from a later issue, was Gathorne-Hardy. In January

1932 an editorial board was placed in charge of the publication. It consisted of Meston,

Gathorne-Hardy, and Zimmern. This same board remained in control until war forced

suspension of publication at the end of 1939, When publication was resumed in 1944 in

Canada, the editorial board consisted of Hugh Wyndham, Geoffrey Crowther, and H. A.

R. Gibb. Wyndham is still chairman of the board, but since the war the membership of

the board has changed somewhat. In 1948 it had six members, of whom three are

employees of the Institute, one is the son-in-law of an employee, the fifth is Professor of

Arabic at Oxford, and the last is the chairman, Hugh Wyndham. In 1949 Adam Marris

was added.

In addition to the History of the Peace Conference and the journal International

Affairs, the Institute publishes the annual Survey of International Affairs. This is written

either by members of the Group or by employees of the Institute. The chief writers have

been Toynbee; his second wife, V. M. Boulter; Robert J. Stopford, who appears to be one

of R. H. Brand's men and who wrote the reparations section each year;' H. V. Hodson,

who did the economic sections from 1930-1938; and A. G. B. Fisher, who has done the

economic sections since Hodson. Until 1928 the Survey had an appendix of documents,

but since that year these have been published in a separate volume, usually edited by J.

W. Wheeler-Bennett. Mr. Wheeler-Bennett became a member of the Milner Group and

the Institute by a process of amalgamation. In 1924 he had founded a document service,

which he called Information Service on International Affairs, and in the years following

1924 he published a number of valuable digests of documents and other information on

disarmament, security, the World Court, reparations, etc., as well as a periodical called

the Bulletin of International News. In 1927 he became Honorary Information Secretary of

the RIIA, and in 1930 the Institute bought out all his information services for £3500 and

made them into the Information Department of the Institute, still in charge of Mr.

Wheeler-Bennett. Since the annual Documents on International Affairs resumed

publication in 1944, it has been in charge of Monica Curtis (who may be related to Lionel

Curtis), while Mr. Wheeler-Bennett has been busy elsewhere. In 1938-1939 he was

Visiting Professor of International Relations at the University of Virginia: in 1939-1944

he was in the United States in various propaganda positions with the British Library of

Information and for two years as Head of the British Political Warfare Mission in New

York. Since 1946, he has been engaged in editing, from the British side, an edition of

about twenty volumes of the captured documents of the German Foreign Ministry. He has

also lectured on international affairs at New College, a connection obviously made

through the Milner Group.

The Survey of International Affairs has been financed since 1925 by an endowment of

£20,000 given by Sir Daniel Stevenson for this purpose and also to provide a Research

Chair of International History at the University of London. Arnold J. Toynbee has held

both the professorship and the editorship since their establishment. He has also been

remunerated by other grants from the Institute. When the first major volume of the

Survey, covering the years 1920-1923, was published, a round-table discussion was held

at Chatham House, 17 November 1925, to criticize it. Headlam-Morley was chairman,

and the chief speakers were Curtis, Wyndham, Gathorne-Hardy, Gilbert Murray, and

Toynbee himself.

Since the Survey did not cover British Commonwealth affairs, except in a general

fashion, a project was established for a parallel Survey of British Commonwealth

Relations. This was financed by a grant of money from the Carnegie Corporation of New

York. The task was entrusted to W. K. Hancock, a member of All Souls since 1924 and

Chichele Professor of Economic History residing at All Souls since 1944. He produced

three substantial volumes of the Survey in 1940-1942, with a supplementary legal chapter

in volume I by R. T. E. Latham of All Souls and the Milner Group.

The establishment of the Stevenson Chair of International History at London,

controlled by the RIIA, gave the Croup the idea of establishing similar endowed chairs in

other subjects and in other places. In 1936, Sir Henry Price gave £20,000 to endow for

seven years a Chair of International Economics at Chatham House. This was filled by

Allan G. B. Fisher of Australia.

In 1947 another chair was established at Chatham House: the Abe Bailey

Professorship of Commonwealth Relations. This was filled by Nicholas Mansergh, who

had previously written a few articles on Irish affairs and has since published a small

volume on Commonwealth affairs.

By the terms of the foundation, the Institute had a voice in the election of professors to

the Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University College of Wales,

Aberystwyth. As a result, this chair has been occupied by close associates of the Group

from its foundation. The following list of incumbents is significant:

A. E. Zimmern, 1919-1921

C. K. Webster, 1922-1932

J. D Greene, 1932-1934

J. F. Vranek, (Acting), 1934-1936

E. H. Carr, 1936 to now

Three of these names are familiar. Of the others, Jiri Vranek was secretary to the

International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (to be discussed in a moment). Jerome

Greene was an international banker close to the Milner Group. Originally Mr. Greene had

been a close associate of J. D. Rockefeller, but in 1917 he shifted to the international

banking firm Lee, Higginson, and Company of Boston. In 1918 he was American

secretary to the Allied Maritime Transport Council in London (of which Arthur Salter

was general secretary). He became a resident of Toynbee Hall and established a

relationship with the Milner Group. In 1919 he was secretary to the Reparations

Commission of the Peace Conference (a post in which his successor was Arthur Salter in

1920-1922). He was chairman of the Pacific Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations

in 1929-1932. This last point will be discussed in a moment. Mr. Greene was a trustee

and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913-1917, and was a trustee of the

Rockefeller Institute and of the Rockefeller General Education Board in 1912-1939.

The study groups of the RIIA are direct descendants of the roundtable meetings of the

Round Table Group. They have been defined by Stephen King-Hall as "unofficial Royal

Commissions charged by the Council of Chatham House with the investigation of

specific problems." These study groups are generally made up of persons who are not

members of the Milner Group, and their reports are frequently published by the Institute.

In 1932 the Rockefeller Foundation gave the Institute a grant of £8000 a year for five

years to advance the study-group method of research. This was extended for five years

more in 1937.

In 1923, Lionel Curtis got a Canadian, Colonel R. W. Leonard, so interested in the

work of the Institute that he bought Lord Kinnaird's house at 10 St. James Square as a

home for the Institute. Since William Pitt had once lived in the building, it was named

"Chatham House," a designation which is now generally applied to the Institute itself.

The only condition of the grant was that the Institute should raise an endowment to yield

at least £10,000 a year for upkeep. Since the building had no adequate assembly hall, Sir

John Power, the honorary treasurer, gave £10,000 to build one on the rear. The building

itself was renovated and furnished under the care of Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, who, like her

late husband but unlike her son, Oliver, was a member of the Milner Group.

The assumption of the title to Chatham House brought up a major crisis within the

Institute when a group led by Professor A. F. Pollard (Fellow of All Souls but not a

member of the Milner Group) opposed the acceptance of the gift because of the financial

commitment involved. Curtis put on an organized drive to mobilize the Group and put the

opposition to flight. The episode is mentioned in a letter from John Dove to Brand, dated

9 October 1923.

This episode opens up the whole question of the financial resources available to the

Institute and to the Milner Group in general. Unfortunately, we cannot examine the

subject here, but it should be obvious that a group with such connections as the Milner

Group would not find it difficult to finance the RIIA. In general, the funds came from the

various endowments, banks, and industrial concerns with which the Milner Group had

relationships. The original money in 1919, only £200, came from Abe Bailey. In later

years he added to this, and in 1928 gave £5000 a year in perpetuity on the condition that

the Institute never accept members who were not British subjects. When Sir Abe died in

1940, the annual Report of the Council said: "With the passing of Sir Bailey the Council

and all the members of Chatham House mourn the loss of their most munificent

Founder." Sir Abe had paid various other expenses during the years. For example, when

the Institute in November 1935 gave a dinner to General Smuts, Sir Abe paid the cost. All

of this was done as a disciple of Lord Milner, for whose principles of imperial policy

Bailey always had complete devotion.

Among the other benefactors of the Institute, we might mention the following. In 1926

the Carnegie United Kingdom Trustees (Hichens and Dame Janet Courtney) gave £3000

for books; the Bank of England gave £600; J. D. Rockefeller gave £3000. In 1929

pledges were obtained from about a score of important banks and corporations, promising

annual grants to the Institute. Most of these had one or more members of the Milner

Group on their boards of directors. Included in the group were the Anglo-Iranian Oil

Company; the Bank of England; Barclay's Bank; Baring Brothers; the British American

Tobacco Company; the British South Africa Company; Central Mining and Investment

Corporation; Erlangers, Ltd; the Ford Motor Company; Hambros' Bank; Imperial

Chemical Industries; Lazard Brothers; Lever Brothers; Lloyd's; Lloyd's Bank; the

Mercantile and General Insurance Company; the Midland Bank; Reuters; Rothschild and

Sons; Stern Brothers; Vickers-Armstrong; the Westminster Bank; and Whitehall

Securities Corporation.

Since 1939 the chief benefactors of the Institute have been the Astor family and Sir

Henry Price. In 1942 the latter gave £50,000 to buy the house next door to Chatham

House for an expansion of the library (of which E. L. Woodward was supervisor). In the

same year Lord Astor, who had been giving £2000 a year since 1937, promised £3000 a

year for seven years to form a Lord Lothian Memorial Fund to promote good relations

between the United States and Britain. At the same time, each of Lord Astor's four sons

promised £1000 a year for seven years to the general fund of the Institute.

Chatham House had close institutional relations with a number of other similar

organizations, especially in the Dominions. It also has a parallel organization, which was

regarded as a branch, in New York. This latter, the Council on Foreign Relations, was not

founded by the American group that attended the meeting at the Hotel Majestic in 1919,

but was taken over almost entirely by that group immediately after its founding in 1919.

This group was made up of the experts on the American delegation to the Peace

Conference who were most closely associated with J. P. Morgan and Company. The

Morgan bank has never made any real effort to conceal its position in regard to the

Council on Foreign Relations. The list of officers and board of directors are printed in

every issue of Foreign Affairs and have always been loaded with partners, associates, and

employees of J. P. Morgan and Company. According to Stephen King-Hall, the RIIA

agreed to regard the Council on Foreign Relations as its American branch. The

relationship between the two has always been very close. For example, the publications

of one are available at reduced prices to the members of the other; they frequently sent

gifts of books to each other (the Council, for example, giving the Institute a seventy-five-

volume set of the Foreign Relations of the United States in 1933); and there is

considerable personal contact between the officers of the two (Toynbee, for example, left

the manuscript of Volumes 7-9 of A Study of History in the Council's vault during the

recent war).

Chatham House established branch institutes in the various Dominions, but it was a

slow process. In each case the Dominion Institute was formed about a core consisting of

the Round Table Group's members in that Dominion. The earliest were set up in Canada

and Australia in 1927. The problem was discussed in 1933 at the first unofficial British

Commonwealth relations conference (Toronto), and the decision made to extend the

system to New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Newfoundland. The last-named was

established by Zimmern on a visit there the same year. The others were set up in 1934-

1936.

As we have said, the members of the Dominion Institutes of International Affairs were

the members of the Milner Group and their close associates. In Canada, for example,

Robert L. Borden was the first president (1927-1931); N. W. Rowell was the second

president; Sir Joseph Flavelle and Vincent Massey were vice-presidents; Glazebrook was

honorary secretary; and Percy Corbett was one of the most important members. Of these,

the first three were close associates of the Milner Group (especially of Brand) in the

period of the First World War; the last four were members of the Group itself. When the

Indian Institute was set up in 1936, it was done at the Viceroy's house at a meeting

convened by Lord Willingdon (Brand's cousin). Robert Cecil sent a message, which was

read by Stephen King-Hall. Sir Maurice Gwyer of All Souls became a member of the

council. In South Africa, B. K. Long of the Kindergarten was one of the most important

members. In the Australian Institute, Sir Thomas Bavin was president in 1934-1941,

while F. W. Eggleston was one of its principal founders and vice-president for many

years. In New Zealand, W. Downie Stewart was president of the Institute of International

Affairs from 1935 on. Naturally, the Milner Group did not monopolize the membership

or the official positions in these new institutes any more than they did in London, for this

would have weakened the chief aim of the Group in setting them up, namely to extend

their influence to wider areas.

Closely associated with the various Institutes of International Affairs were the various

branches of the Institute of Pacific Relations. This was originally founded at Atlantic City

in September 1924 as a private organization to study the problems of the Pacific Basin. It

has representatives from eight countries with interests in the area. The representatives

from the United Kingdom and the three British Dominions were closely associated with

the Milner Group. Originally each country had its national unit, but by 1939, in the four

British areas, the local Institute of Pacific Relations had merged with the local Institute of

International Affairs. Even before this, the two Institutes in each country had practically

interchangeable officers, dominated by the Milner Group. In the United States, the

Institute of Pacific Relations never merged with the Council on Foreign Relations, but the

influence of the associates of J. P. Morgan and other international bankers remained

strong on both. The chief figure in the Institute of Pacific Relations of the United States

was, for many years, Jerome D. Greene, Boston banker close to both Rockefeller and

Morgan and for many years secretary to Harvard University.

The Institutes of Pacific Relations held joint meetings, similar to those of the

unofficial conferences on British Commonwealth relations and with a similar group of

delegates from the British member organizations. These meetings met every two years at

first, beginning at Honolulu in 1925 and then assembling at Honolulu again (1927), at

Kyoto (1929), at Shanghai (1931), at Banff (1933), and at Yosemite Park (1936). F. W.

Eggleston, of Australia and the Milner Group, presided over most of the early meetings.

Between meetings, the central organization, set up in 1927, was the Pacific Council, a

self-perpetuating body. In 1930, at least five of its seven members were from the Milner

Group, as can be seen from the following list:

The Pacific Council, 1930

Jerome D. Greene of the United States

F. W. Eggleston of Australia

N. W. Rowell of Canada

D. Z. T. Yui of China

Lionel Curtis of the United Kingdom

I. Nitobe of Japan

Sir James Allen of New Zealand

The close relationships among all these organizations can be seen from a tour of

inspection which Lionel Curtis and Ivison S. Macadam (secretary of Chatham House, in

succession to F. B. Bourdillon, since 1929) made in 1938. They not only visited the

Institutes of International Affairs of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada but attended the

Princeton meeting of the Pacific Council of the IPR. Then they separated, Curtis going to

New York to address the dinner of the Council on Foreign Relations and visit the

Carnegie Foundation, while Macadam went to Washington to visit the Carnegie

Endowment and the Brookings Institution.

Through the League of Nations, where the influence of the Milner Group was very

great, the RIIA was able to extend its intellectual influence into countries outside the

Commonwealth. This was done, for example, through the Intellectual Cooperation

Organization of the League of Nations. This Organization consisted of two chief parts:

(a) The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory body; and (b)

The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, an executive organ of the

Committee, with headquarters in Paris. The International Committee had about twenty

members from various countries; Gilbert Murray was its chief founder and was chairman

from 1928 to its disbandment in 1945. The International Institute was established by the

French government and handed over to the League of Nations (1926). Its director was

always a Frenchman, but its deputy director and guiding spirit was Alfred Zimmern from

1926 to 1930. It also had a board of directors of six persons; Gilbert Murray was one of

these from 1926.

It is interesting to note that from 1931 to 1939 the Indian representative on the

International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. In

1931 he was George V Professor of Philosophy at Calcutta University. His subsequent

career is interesting. He was knighted in 1931, became Spalding Professor of Eastern

Religions and Ethics at Oxford in 1936, and became a Fellow of All Souls in 1944.

Beginning in 1928 at Berlin, Professor Zimmern organized annual round-table

discussion meetings under the auspices of the International Institute of Intellectual

Cooperation. These were called the International Studies Conferences and devoted

themselves to an effort to obtain different national points of view on international

problems. The members of the Studies Conferences were twenty-five organizations.

Twenty of these were Coordinating Committees created for the purpose in twenty

different countries. The other five were the following international organizations: The

Academy of International Law at The Hague; The European Center of the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace; the Geneva School of International Studies; the

Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva; the Institute of Pacific Relations. In

two of these five, the influence of the Milner Group and its close allies was preponderant.

In addition, the influence of the Group was decisive in the Coordinating Committees

within the British Commonwealth, especially in the British Coordinating Committee for

International Studies. The members of this committee were named by four agencies, three

of which were controlled by the Milner Group. They were: (1) the RIIA, (2) the London

School of Economics and Political Science, (3) the Department of International Politics at

University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and (4) the Montague Burton Chair of

International Relations at Oxford. We have already indicated that the Montague Burton

Chair was largely controlled by the Milner Group, since the Group always had a

preponderance on the board of electors to that chair. This was apparently not assured by

the original structure of this board, and it was changed in the middle 1930s. After the

change, the board had seven electors: (1) the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, ex officio; (2)

the Master of Balliol, ex officio; (3) Viscount Cecil of Chelwood; (4) Gilbert Murray, for

life; (5) B. H. Sumner; (6) Sir Arthur Salter; and (7) Sir. J. Fischer Williams of New

College. Thus, at least four of this board were members of the Group. In 1947 the

electoral board to the Montague Burton Professorship consisted of R. M. Barrington-

Ward (editor of The Times); Miss Agnes Headlam-Morley (daughter of Sir James

Headlam-Morley of the Group); Sir Arthur Salter; R. C. K. Ensor; and one vacancy, to be

filled by Balliol College. It was this board, apparently, that named Miss Headlam-Morley

to the Montague Burton Professorship when E. L. Woodward resigned in 1947. As can be

seen, the Milner Group influence was predominant, with only one member out of five

(Ensor) clearly not of the Group.

The RIIA had the right to name three persons to the Coordinating Committee. Two of

these were usually of the Milner Group. In 1933, for example, the three were Lord

Meston, Clement Jones, and Toynbee.

The meetings of the International Studies Conferences were organized in a fashion

identical with that used in other meetings controlled by the Milner Group—for example,

in the unofficial conferences on British Commonwealth relations—and the proceedings

were published by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in a similar way to those of the

unofficial conferences just mentioned, except that the various speakers were identified by

name. As examples of the work which the International Studies Conferences handled, we

might mention that at the fourth and fifth sessions (Copenhagen in 1931 and Milan in