Anglo-American Establishment

1932), they examined the problem of "The State and Economic Life"; at the seventh and

eighth session (Paris in 1934 and London in 1935), they examined the problem of

"Collective Security"; and at the ninth and tenth sessions (Madrid in 1936 and Paris

1937) they examined the problem of "University Teaching of International Relations."

In all of these conferences the Milner Group played a certain part. They could have

monopolized the British delegations at these meetings if they had wished, but, with

typical Milner Group modesty they made no effort to do so. Their influence appeared

most clearly at the London meeting of 1935. Thirty-nine delegates from fourteen

countries assembled at Chatham House to discuss the problem of collective security.

Great Britain had ten delegates. They were Dr. Hugh Dalton, Professor H. Lauterpacht,

Captain Liddell Hart, Lord Lytton, Professor A. D. McNair, Professor C. A. W. Manning,

Dr. David Mitrany, Rear Admiral H. G. Thursfield, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Professor C.

K. Webster. In addition, the Geneva School of International Studies sent two delegates: J.

H. Richardson and A. E. Zimmern. The British delegation presented three memoranda to

the conference. The first, a study of "Sanctions," was prepared by the RIIA and has been

published since. The second, a study of "British Opinion on Collective Security," was

prepared by the British Coordinating Committee. The third, a collection of "British

Views on Collective Security," was prepared by the delegates. It had an introduction by

Meston and nine articles, of which one was by G. M. Gathorne-Hardy and one by H. V.

Hodson. Zimmern also presented a memorandum on behalf of the Geneva School.

Opening speeches were made by Austen Chamberlain, Allen W. Dulles (of the Council

on Foreign Relations), and Louis Eisenmann of the University of Paris. Closing speeches

were made by Lord Meston, Allen Dulles, and Gilbert Murray. Meston acted as president

of the conference, and Dulles as chairman of the study meetings. The proceedings were

edited and published by a committee of two Frenchmen and A. J. Toynbee.

At the sessions on "Peaceful Change" in 1936-37, Australia presented one

memorandum ("The Growth of Australian Population"). It was written by F. W.

Eggleston and G. Packer. The United Kingdom presented fifteen memoranda. Eight of

these were prepared by the RIIA, and seven by individuals. Of the seven individual

works, two were written by members of All Souls who were also members of the Milner

Group (C. A. Macartney and C. R. M. F. Cruttwell). The other five were written by

experts who were not members of the Group (A. M. Carr-Saunders, A. B. Keith, D.

Harwood, H. Lauterpacht, and R. Kuczynski).

In the middle 1930s the Milner Group began to take an interest in the problem of

refugees and stateless persons, as a result of the persecutions of Hitler and the

approaching closing of the Nansen Office of the League of Nations. Sir Neill Malcolm

was made High Commissioner for German Refugees in 1936. The following year the

RIIA began a research program in the problem. This resulted in a massive report, edited

by Sir John Hope Simpson who was not a member of the Group and was notoriously

unsympathetic to Zionism (1939). In 1938 Roger M. Makins was made secretary to the

British delegation to the Evian Conference on Refugees. Mr. Makins' full career will be

examined later. At this point it is merely necessary to note that he was educated at

Winchester School and at Christ Church, Oxford, and was elected to a Fellowship at All

Souls in 1925, when only twenty-one years old. After the Evian Conference (where the

British, for strategic reasons, left all the responsible positions to the Americans), Mr.

Makins was made secretary to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. He was

British Minister in Washington from 1945 to 1947 and is now Assistant Under Secretary

in the Foreign Office.

Before leaving the subject of refugees, we might mention that the chief British agent

for Czechoslovakian refugees in 1938-1939 was R. J. Stopford, an associate of the Milner

Group already mentioned.

At the time of the Czechoslovak crisis in September 1938, the RIIA began to act in an

unofficial fashion as an adviser to the Foreign Office. When war began a year later, this

was made formal, and Chatham House became, for all practical purposes, the research

section of the Foreign Office. A special organization was established in the Institute, in

charge of A. J. Toynbee, with Lionel Curtis as his chief support acting "as the permanent

representative of the chairman of the Council, Lord Astor." The organization consisted of

the press-clipping collection, the information department, and much of the library. These

were moved to Oxford and set up in Balliol, All Souls, and Rhodes House. The project

was financed by the Treasury, All Souls, Balliol, and Chatham House jointly. Within a

brief time, the organization became known as the Foreign Research and Press Service

(FRPS). It answered all questions on international affairs from government departments,

prepared a weekly summary of the foreign press, and prepared special research projects.

When Anthony Eden was asked a question in the House of Commons on 23 July 1941,

regarding the expense of this project, he said that the Foreign Office had given it £53,000

in the fiscal year 1940-1941.

During the winter of 1939-1940 the general meetings of the Institute were held in

Rhodes House, Oxford, with Hugh Wyndham generally presiding. The periodical

International Affairs suspended publication, but the Bulletin of International News

continued, under the care of Hugh Latimer and A. J. Brown. The latter had been an

undergraduate at Oxford in 1933-1936, was elected a Fellow of All Souls in 1938, and

obtained a D.Phil. in 1939. The former may be Alfred Hugh Latimer, who was an

undergraduate at Merton from 1938 to 1946 and was elected to the foundation of the

same college in 1946.

As the work of the FRPS grew too heavy for Curtis to supervise alone, he was given a

committee of four assistants. They were G. N. Clark, H. J. Paton, C. K. Webster, and A.

E. Zimmern. About the same time, the London School of Economics established a

quarterly journal devoted to the subject of postwar reconstruction. It was called Agenda,

and G. N. Clark was editor. Clark had been a member of All Souls since 1912 and was

Chichele Professor of Economic History from 1931 to 1943. Since 1943 he has been

Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Not a member of the Milner Group,

he is close to it and was a member of the council of Chatham House during the recent

war.

At the end of 1942 the Foreign Secretary (Eden) wrote to Lord Astor that the

government wished to take the FRPS over completely. This was done in April 1943. The

existing Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office was merged with it to

make the new Research Department of the Ministry. Of this new department Toynbee

was director and Zimmern deputy director.

This brief sketch of the Royal Institute of International Affairs does not by any means

indicate the very considerable influence which the organization exerts in English-

speaking countries in the sphere to which it is devoted. The extent of that influence must

be obvious. The purpose of this chapter has been something else: to show that the Milner

Group controls the Institute. Once that is established, the picture changes. The influence

of Chatham House appears in its true perspective, not as the influence of an autonomous

body but as merely one of many instruments in the arsenal of another power. When the

influence which the Institute wields is combined with that controlled by the Milner Group

in other fields—in education, in administration, in newspapers and periodicals—a really

terrifying picture begins to emerge. This picture is called terrifying not because the power

of the Milner Group was used for evil ends. It was not. On the contrary, it was generally

used with the best intentions in the world—even if those intentions were so idealistic as

to be almost academic. The picture is terrifying because such power, whatever the goals

at which it may be directed, is too much to be entrusted safely to any group. That it was

too much to be safely entrusted to the Milner Group will appear quite clearly in Chapter

12. No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group accomplished

in Britain—that is, that a small number of men should be able to wield such power in

administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication

of the documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over

the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize

so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period.

Chapter 11—India, 1911-1945

India was one of the primary concerns of both the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. The

latter probably devoted more time and attention to India than to any other subject. This

situation reached its peak in 1919, and the Government of India Act of that year is very

largely a Milner Group measure in conception, formation, and execution. The influence

of the two groups is not readily apparent from the lists of Governors-general (Viceroys)

and Secretaries of State for India in the twentieth century:

Viceroys

Lord Curzon, 1898-1905

Lord Minto, 1905-1910

Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, 1910-1916

Lord Chelmsford, 1916-1921

Lord Reading, 1921-1926

Lord Irwin, 1926-1931

Lord Willingdon, 1931-1936

Lord Linlithgow, 1936-1943

Secretaries of State

Lord George Hamilton, 1895-1903

St. John Brodrick, 1903-1908

John Morley, 1908-1910

Lord Crewe, 1910-1915

Austen Chamberlain, 1915-1917

Edward Montagu, 1917-1922

Lord Peel, 1922-1924

Lord Olivier, 1924

Lord Birkenhead, 1924-1928

Lord Peel, 1928-1929

Wedgwood Benn, 1929-1931

Samuel Hoare, 1931-1935

Lord Zetland, 1935-1940

Leopold Amery, 1940-1945

Of the Viceroys only one (Reading) is clearly of neither the Cecil Bloc nor the Milner

Group; two were members of the Milner Group (Irwin and Willingdon); another was a

member of both groups (Chelmsford); the rest were of the Cecil Bloc, although in two

cases (Minto and Linlithgow) in a rather peripheral fashion. Three of the eight were

members of All Souls. According to Lord Esher, the appointment of Lord Hardinge in

1910 was made at his suggestion, by John Morley. At the time, Esher's son, the present

Viscount Esher, was acting as unpaid private secretary to Morley, a position he held for

five years (1905-1910). From the same source we learn that the Viceroyship was offered

to Selborne in 1903 and to Esher himself in 1908. The former failed of appointment

because Curzon refused to retire, while the latter rejected the post as of too limited

influence.

Of the thirteen Secretaries of State, two were Labour and two Liberals. One of these

latter (Morley) was close to the Milner Group. Of the other nine, three were of the Cecil

Bloc (St. John Brodrick, Austen Chamberlain, and Lord Zetland), two were of the Milner

Group (Hoare and Amery), and four were of neither group.

The political and constitutional history of India in the twentieth century consists

largely of a series of investigations by various committees and commissions, and a

second, and shorter, series of legislative enactments. The influence of the Milner Group

can be discerned in both of these, especially in regard to the former.

Of the important commissions that investigated Indian constitutional questions in the

twentieth century, every one has had a member of the inner circle of the Milner Group.

The following list gives the name of the commission, the dates of its existence, the

number of British members (in distinction from Indian members), the names of

representatives from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group (with the latter italicized), and the

command number of its report:

1. The Royal Commission on Decentralization in India, 1907-1909, five members

including W. L. Hichens (Cmd. 4360- of 1908).

2. The Royal Commission on Public Services in India, 1912-1915, nine members

including Baron Islington, the Earl of Ronaldshay (later Marquess of Zetland), Sir

Valentine Chirol, and H. A. L. Fisher. The chairman of this commission, Lord Islington,

was later father-in-law to Sir Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham) (Cmd. 8382 of 1916).

3. The Government of India Constitutional Reform Committee on Franchise, 1919,

four members, including Malcolm Hailey.

4. The Government of India Constitutional Reform Committee on

Functions, 1919, four members, including Richard Feetham as chairman.

5. The Joint Select Committee on the Government of India Bill, 1919, fourteen

members, including Lord Selborne (chairman), Lord Midleton (St. John Brodrick), Lord

Islington, Sir Henry Craik (whose son was in Milner's Kindergarten), and W. G. A.

Ormsby-Gore (now Lord Harlech) (Cmd. 97 of 1919).

6. The Committee on Home Administration of Indian Affairs, 1919, eight members,

including W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech) (Cmd. 207 of 1919).

7. The Royal Commission on Superior Civil Services in India, 1923-1924, five

members, including Lord Lee of Fareham as chairman and Reginald Coupland (Cmd.

2128 of 1924).

8. The Indian Statutory Commission, 1927-1930, seven members, with Sir John Simon

as chairman (Cmd. 3568 and 3569 of 1930).

9. The Indian Franchise Committee, 1931-1932, eight members, including Lord

Lothian as chairman and Lord Dufferin (whose brother, Lord Basil Blackwood, had been

in Milner's Kindergarten) (Cmd. 4086 of 1932).

10. The three Indian Round Table Conferences of 1930-1932 contained a number of

members of the Milner Croup. The first session (November 1930-January 1931) had

eighty-nine delegates, sixteen from Britain, sixteen from the Indian States, and fifty-

seven from British India. Formed as they were by a Labour government, the first two

sessions had eight Labour members among the sixteen from Britain. The other eight were

Earl Peel, the Marquess of Zetland, Sir Samuel Hoare, Oliver Stanley, the Marquess of

Reading, the Marquess of Lothian, Sir Robert Hamilton, and Isaac Foot. Of these eight,

two were of the Milner Croup (Hoare and Lothian) and two of the Cecil Bloc (Zetland

and Stanley). The chief adviser to the Indian States Delegation was L. F. Rushbrook

Williams of the Milner Group, who was named to his position by the Chamber of Princes

Special Organization. Among the five officials called in for consultation by the

conference, we find the name of Malcolm Hailey (Cmd. 3778).

The membership of delegations at the second session (September-December 1931)

was practically the same, except that thirty-one additional members were added and

Rushbrook Williams became a delegate as the representative of the Maharaja of

Nawanagar (Cmd. 3997).

At the third session (November-December 1932) there were no Labour Party

representatives. The British delegation was reduced to twelve. Four of these were of the

Milner Group ( Hoare, Simon, Lothian, and Irwin, now Halifax). Rushbrook Williams

continued as a delegate of the Indian States (Cmd. 4238).

11. The Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, appointed in April

1933, had sixteen members from the House of Commons and an equal number of Lords.

Among these were such members of the Milner Group as Sir Samuel Hoare, Sir John

Simon, Lord Lothian, and Lord Irwin (Halifax). The Cecil Bloc was also well represented

by Archbishop Lang of Canterbury, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Eustace Percy, Lord

Salisbury, Lord Zetland, Lord Lytton, and Lord Hardinge of Penshurst.

12. The Cripps Mission, 1942, four members, including Reginald Coupland, who

wrote an unofficial but authoritative book on the mission as soon as it returned to

England (Cmd. 6350).

The chief legislative events in this period were five in number: the two Indian

Councils Acts of 1892 and 1909, the two Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935,

and the achievement of self-government in 1947.

The Indian Councils Act of 1892 was put through the House of Commons by George

Curzon, at that time Under Secretary in the India Office as the protege of Lord Salisbury,

who had discovered him in All Souls nine years earlier. This act was important for two

reasons: (1) it introduced a representative principle into the Indian government by

empowering the Governor-General and Provincial Governors to seek nominations to

the"unofficial" seats in their councils from particular Indian groups and associations; and

(2) it accepted a "communal" basis for this representation by seeking these nominations

separately from Hindus, Moslems, and others. From these two sources flowed ultimately

self-government and partition, although it is perfectly evident that neither of these was

anticipated or desired by the persons who supported the act.

The nominations for "unofficial" members of the councils provided in the Act of 1892

became elections in practice, because the Governor-General always accepted the

suggested nominations as his nominees. This practice became law in the Act of 1909.

The Indian Councils Act of 1909 was passed under a Liberal government and was

only remotely influenced by the Cecil Bloc or Milner Group. The Prime Minister,

Asquith, was practically a member of the Cecil Bloc, being an intimate friend of Balfour

and Rosebery. This relationship had been tightened when he married Margot Tennant, a

member of "the Souls," in 1894. Margot Tennant's sister, Laura, had previously married

Alfred Lyttelton, and both sisters had been intimate friends of Curzon and other members

of "the Souls." Asquith had also been, as we have stated, a close associate of Milner's.

Asquith, however, was never a member of the Milner Group. After 1890, and especially

after 1915, he increasingly became a member of the Cecil Bloc. It was Balfour who

persuaded Asquith to write his Memories and Reflections after he (Balfour) had discussed

the matter with Margot Asquith over a tête-à-tête dinner. These dinners were a not

infrequent occurrence on the evenings when Asquith himself dined at his club, Asquith

usually stopping by later in the evening to get his wife and escort her home. Another

indication of Asquith's feeling toward the Cecil Bloc can be found in his autobiography

under the date 22 December 1919. On that occasion Asquith told Lady Hartington,

daughter of Lord Salisbury, that he "had not expected to live to see the day when the best

safeguard for true liberalism would be found in an unreformed House of Lords and the

Cecil family."

In 1908-1909, however, the situation was somewhat different, and Asquith could

hardly be called a member of the Cecil Bloc. In a somewhat similar situation, although

much closer to the Milner Group (through H. A. L. Fisher and All Souls), was John

Morley, the Secretary of State for India. Lord Minto, the Governor-General in India, was

also a member of the Cecil Bloc in a peripheral fashion but held his appointment through

a family claim on the Governor-Generalship rather than by favor of the Cecils.

The Act of 1909, however, while not a product of the groups with which we are

concerned, was formed in the same social tradition, drawn up from the same intellectual

and social outlook, and put into effect in the same fashion. It legalized the principle of

election (rather than nomination) to Indian councils, enlarged their membership to

provide majorities of non-officials in the provincial councils, and gave them the power to

discuss affairs and pass resolutions. The seats were allotted to communal groups, with the

minorities (like Moslems and Sikhs) receiving more than their proportionate share and

the Moslems having, in addition, a separate electorate for the incumbents of Moslem

seats. This served to encourage extremism among the Moslems and, while a logical

development of 1892, was a long step on the road to Pakistan. This Act of 1909 was, as

we have mentioned, put through the House of Commons by Sir Thomas Buchanan, a

Fellow of All Souls and an associate of the Cecil Bloc.

The Government of India Act of 1919 is outstanding in many ways. It is the most

drastic and most important reform made in Indian government in the whole period from

1861 to the achievement of self-government. Its provisions for the central government of

India remained in force, with only slight changes, from 1919 to 1946. It is the only one of

these acts whose "secret" legislative background is no longer a secret. And it is the only

one which indicated a desire on the part of the British government to establish in India a

responsible government patterned on that in Britain.

The legislative history of the Act of 1919 as generally known is simple enough. It runs

as follows. In August 1917 the Secretary of State for India, Edwin S. Montagu, issued a

statement which read: "The policy of H.M. Government, with which the Government of

India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every

branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-government institutions

with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an

integral part of the British Empire." The critical word here is responsible government,

since the prospect of eventual self-government had been held out to India for years. In

accordance with this promise, Montagu visited India and, in cooperation with the

Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, issued the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, indicating the

direction of future policy. This report became the basis for the bill of 1918, which, after a

certain amount of amendment by Lord Selborne's Joint Select Committee, came into

force as the Government of India Act of 1919.

The secret history of this Act is somewhat different, and begins in Canada in 1909,

when Lionel Curtis accepted from his friend William Marris the idea that responsible

government on the British pattern should be extended to India. Two years later, Curtis

formed a study group of six or eight persons within the London Round Table Group. We

do not know for certain who were the members of the study group, but apparently it

included Curtis, Kerr, Fisher, and probably Brand. To these were added three officials of

the India Office. These included Malcolm Seton (Sir Malcolm after 1919), who was

secretary to the Judicial Department of the India Office and joined Curtis's group about

1913; and Sir William Duke, who was Lieutenant Governor of Bengal in 1911-1912,

senior member of the council of the Governor of Bengal in 1912-1914, and a member of

the Council of India in London after 1914. At this last date he joined the Curtis group.

Both of these men were important figures in the India Office later, Sir William as

Permanent Under Secretary from 1920 to his death in 1924, and Sir Malcolm as Assistant

Under Secretary (1919-1924) and Deputy Under Secretary (1924-1933). Sir Malcolm

wrote the biographical sketch of Sir William in the Dictionary of National Biography,

and also wrote the volume on The India Office in the Whitehall Series (1926). The third

member from this same source was Sir Lionel Abrahams, Assistant Under Secretary in

the India Office.

The Curtis study group was not an official committee, although some persons (both at

the time and since) have believed it was. Among these persons would appear to be Lord

Chelmsford, for in debate in the House of Lords in November 1927 he said:

“I came home from India in January 1916 for six weeks before I went out again as

Viceroy, and, when I got home, I found that there was a Committee in existence at the

India Office, which was considering on what lines future constitutional development

might take place. That Committee, before my return in the middle of March gave me a

pamphlet containing in broad outline the views which were held with regard to future

constitutional development. When I reached India I showed this pamphlet to my Council

and also to my noble friend, Lord Meston, who was then Lieutenant Governor of the

United Provinces. It contained, what is now known as the diarchic principle.... Both the

Council and Lord Meston, who was then Sir James Meston, reported adversely on the

proposals for constitutional development contained in that pamphlet.”

Lord Chelmsford then goes on to say that Austen Chamberlain combated their

objections with the argument that the Indians must acquire experience in self-

government, so, after the announcement to this effect was made publicly in August 1917,

the officials in India accepted dyarchy.

If Lord Chelmsford believed that the pamphlet was an official document from a

committee in the India Office, he was in error. The other side of the story was revealed

by Lionel Curtis in 1920 in his book

Dyarchy. According to Curtis, the study group was originally formed to help him write

the chapter on India in the planned second volume of The Commonwealth of Nations. It

set as its task "to enquire how self-government could be introduced and peacefully

extended to India." The group met once a fortnight in London and soon decided on the

dyarchy principle. This principle, as any reader of Curtis's writings knows, was basic in

Curtis's political thought and was the foundation on which he hoped to build a federated

Empire. According to Curtis, the study group asked itself: "Could not provincial

electorates through legislatures and ministers of their own be made clearly responsible for

certain functions of government to begin with, leaving all others in the hands of

executives responsible as at present to the Government of India and the Secretary of

State? Indian electorates, legislatures, and executives would thus be given a field for the

exercise of genuine responsibility. From time to time fresh powers could be transferred

from the old governments as the new elective authorities developed and proved their

capacity for assuming them." From this point of view, Curtis asked Duke to draw up such

"a plan of Devolution" for Bengal. This plan was printed by the group, circulated, and

criticized in typical Milner Group fashion. Then the whole group went to Oxford for

three days and met to discuss it in the old Bursary of Trinity College. It was then

rewritten. "No one was satisfied." It was decided to circulate it for further criticism

among the Round Table Groups throughout the world, but Lord Chelmsford wrote from

New South Wales and asked for a copy. Apparently realizing that he was to be the next

Viceroy of India, the group sent a copy to him and none to the Round Table Groups, "lest

the public get hold of it and embarrass him." It is clear that Chelmsford was committed to

a program of reform along these or similar lines before he went out as Viceroy. This was

revealed in debate in the House of Lords by Lord Crewe on 12 December 1919.

After Chelmsford went to India in March 1916, a new, revised version of the study

group's plan was drawn up and sent to him in May 1916. Another copy was sent to

Canada to catch up with Curtis, who had already left for India by way of Canada,

Australia, and New Zealand. This itinerary was undoubtedly followed by Curtis in order

to consult with members of the Group in various countries, especially with Brand in

Canada. On his arrival in India, Curtis wrote back to Kerr in London:

“The factor which impressed me most in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia was the

rooted aversion these peoples have to any scheme which meant their sharing in the

Government of India.... To these young democratic communities the principle of self-

government is the breath of their nostrils. It is almost a religion. They feel as if there were

something inherently wrong in one people ruling another. It is the same feeling as that

which makes the Americans dislike governing the Philippines and decline to restore order

in Mexico. My first impressions on this subject were strongly confirmed on my recent

visit to these Dominions. I scarcely recall one of the numerous meetings I addressed at

which I was not asked why India was not given self-government and what steps were

being taken in that direction.”

Apparently this experience strengthened Curtis's idea that India must be given

responsible government. He probably felt that by giving India what it and the Dominions

wanted for India, both would be bound in loyalty more closely to Britain. In this same

letter to Kerr, Curtis said, in obvious reference to the Round Table Group:

“Our task then is to bring home to the public in the United Kingdom and the

Dominions how India differs from a country like Great Britain on the one hand and from

Central Africa on the other, and how that difference is now reflected in the character of

its government. We must outline clearly the problems which arise from the contact of

East and West and the disaster which awaits a failure to supply their adequate solution by

realizing and expressing the principle of Government for which we stand. We must then

go on to suggest a treatment of India in the general work of Imperial reconstruction in

harmony with the facts adduced in the foregoing chapters. And all this must be done with

the closest attention to its effects upon educated opinion here. We must do our best to

make Indian Nationalists realize the truth that like South Africa all their hopes and

aspirations are dependent on the maintenance of the British Commonwealth and their

permanent membership therein.”

This letter, written on 13 November 1916, was addressed to Philip Kerr but was

intended for all the members of the Group. Sir Valentine Chirol corrected the draft, and

copies were made available for Meston and Marris. Then Curtis had a thousand copies

printed and sent to Kerr for distribution. In some way, the extremist Indian nationalists

obtained a copy of the letter and published a distorted version of it. They claimed that a

powerful and secret group organized about The Round Table had sent Curtis to India to

spy out the nationalist plans in order to obstruct them. Certain sentences from the letter

were torn from their context to prove this argument. Among these was the reference to

Central Africa, which was presented to the Indian people as a statement that they were as

uncivilized and as incapable of self-government as Central Africans. As a result of the

fears created by this rumor, the Indian National Congress and the Moslem League formed

their one and only formal alliance in the shape of the famous Lucknow Compact of 29

December 1916. The Curtis letter was not the only factor behind the Lucknow agreement,

but it was certainly very influential. Curtis was present at the Congress meeting and was

horrified at the version of his letter which was circulating. Accordingly, he published the

correct version with an extensive commentary, under the title Letters to the People of

India (1917). In this he said categorically that he believed: "(1) That it is the duty of those

who govern the whole British Commonwealth to do anything in their power to enable

Indians to govern themselves as soon as possible. (2) That Indians must also come to

share in the government of the British Commonwealth as a whole." There can be no

doubt that Curtis was sincere in this and that his view reflected, perhaps in an extreme

form, the views of a large and influential group in Great Britain. The failure of this group

to persuade the Indian nationalists that they were sincere is one of the great disasters of

the century, although the fault is not entirely theirs and must be shared by others,

including Gandhi.

In the first few months of 1917, Curtis consulted groups of Indians and individual

British (chiefly of the Milner Group) regarding the form which the new constitution

would take. The first public use of the word "dyarchy" was in an open letter of 6 April

1917, which he wrote to Bhupendra Nath Basu, one of the authors of the Lucknow

Compact, to demonstrate how dyarchy would function in the United Provinces. In writing

this letter, Curtis consulted with Valentine Chirol and Malcolm Hailey. He then wrote an

outline, "The Structure of Indian Government," which was revised by Meston and

printed. This was submitted to many persons for comment. He then organized a meeting

of Indians and British at Lord Sinha's house in Darjeeling and, after considerable

discussion, drew up a twelve-point program, which was signed by sixty-four Europeans

and ninety Indians. This was sent to Chelmsford and to Montagu.

In the meantime, in London, preparations were being made to issue the historic

declaration of 20 August 1917, which promised "responsible" government to India. There

can be no doubt that the Milner Group was the chief factor in issuing that declaration.

Curtis, in Dyarchy, says: "For the purpose of the private enquiry above described the

principle of that pronouncement was assumed in 1915." It is perfectly clear that Montagu

(Secretary of State in succession to Austen Chamberlain from June 1917) did not draw up

the declaration. He drew up a statement, but the India Office substituted for it one which

had been drawn up much earlier, when Chamberlain was still Secretary of State. Lord

Ronaldshay (Lord Zetland), in the third volume of his Life of Curzon, prints both drafts

and claims that the one which was finally issued was drawn up by Curzon. Sir Stanley

Reed, who was editor of The Times of India from 1907 to 1923, declared at a meeting of

the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1926 that the declaration was drawn up by

Milner and Curzon. It is clear that someone other than Curzon had a hand in it, and the

strongest probability would be Milner, who was with Curzon in the War Cabinet at the

time. The fact is that Curzon could not have drawn it up alone unless he was unbelievably

careless, because, after it was published, he was horrified when the promise of

"progressive realization of responsible government in India" was pointed out to him.

Montagu went to India in November 1917, taking Sir William Duke with him. Curtis,

who had been moving about India as the guest of Stanley Reed, Chirol, Chelmsford,

Meston, Marris, and others, was invited to participate in the Montagu-Chelmsford

conferences on several occasions. Others who were frequently consulted were Hailey,

Meston, Duke, and Chirol. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report was written by Sir William

Marris of Milner's Kindergarten after Curtis had returned to England. Curtis wrote in

Dyarchy in 1920: "It was afterwards suggested in the press that I had actually drafted the

report. My prompt denial has not prevented a further complaint from many quarters that

Lord Chelmsford and Mr. Montagu were unduly influenced by an irresponsible tourist....

With the exception of Lord Chelmsford himself I was possibly the only person in India

with firsthand knowledge of responsible government as applied in the Dominions to the

institutions of provinces. Whether my knowledge of India entitled me to advance my

views is more open to question. Of this the reader can judge for himself. But in any case

the interviews were unsought by me." Thus Curtis does not deny the accusation that he

was chiefly responsible for dyarchy. It was believed at the time by persons in a position

to know that he was, and these persons were both for and against the plan. On the latter

side, we might quote Lord Ampthill, who, as a former acting Viceroy, as private secretary

to Joseph Chamberlain, as Governor of Madras, and as brother-in-law of Samuel Hoare,

was in a position to know what was going on. Lord Ampthill declared in the House of

Lords in 1919: "The incredible fact is that, but for the chance visit to India of a globe-

trotting doctrinaire, with a positive mania for constitution-mongering, nobody in the

world would ever have thought of so peculiar a notion as Dyarchy. And yet the Joint

Committee tells us in an airy manner that no better plan can be conceived."

The Joint Committee's favorable report on the Dyarchy Bill was probably not

unconnected with the fact that five out of fourteen members were from the Cecil Bloc or

Milner Group, that the chairman had in his day presided over meetings of the Round

Table Groups and was regarded by them as their second leader, and that the Joint

Committee spent most of its time hearing witnesses who were close to the Milner Group.

The committee heard Lord Meston longer than any other witness (almost four days),

spent a day with Curtis on the stand, and questioned, among others, Feetham, Duke,

Thomas Holland (Fellow of All Souls from 1875 to his death in 1926), Michael Sadler (a

close friend of Milner's and practically a member of the Group), and Stanley Reed. In the

House of Commons the burden of debate on the bill was supported by Montagu, Sir

Henry Craik, H. A. L. Fisher, W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, and Thomas J. Bennett (an old

journalist colleague of Lord Salisbury and principal owner of The Times of India from

1892). Montagu and Craik both referred to Lionel Curtis. The former said: "It is

suggested in some quarters that this bill arose spontaneously in the minds of the Viceroy

and myself without previous inquiry or consideration, under the influence of Mr. Lionel

Curtis. I have never yet been able to understand that you approach the merits of any

discussion by vain efforts to approximate to its authorship. I do not even now understand

that India or the Empire owes anything more or less than a great debt of gratitude to the

patriotic and devoted services Mr. Curtis has given to the consideration of this problem."

Sir Henry Craik later said: "I am glad to join in the compliment paid to our mutual

friend, Mr. Lionel Curtis, who belongs to a very active, and a very important body of

young men, whom I should be the last to criticize. I am proud to know him, and to pay

that respect to him due from age to youth. He and others of the company of the Round

Table have been doing good work, and part of that good work has been done in India.”

Mr. Fisher had nothing to say about Lionel Curtis but had considerable to say about

the bill and the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. He said: "There is nothing in this Bill

which is not contained in that Report. That Report is not only a very able and eloquent

State Paper, but it is also one of the greatest State Papers which have been produced in

Anglo-Indian history, and it is an open-minded candid State Paper, a State Paper which

does not ignore or gloss over the points of criticism which have since been elaborated in

the voluminous documents which have been submitted to us." He added, a moment later:

"This is a great Bill." (2) The Round Table, which also approved of the bill, as might be

imagined, referred to Fisher's speech in its issue of September 1919 and called him "so

high an authority." The editor of that issue was Lionel Curtis.

In the House of Lords there was less enthusiasm. Chief criticism centered on two basic

points, both of which originated with Curtis: (1) the principle of dyarchy—that is, that

government could be separated into two classes of activities under different regimes; and

(2) the effort to give India "responsible" government rather than merely "self-

government"—that is, the effort to extend to India a form of government patterned on

Britain's. Both of these principles were criticized vigorously, especially by members of

the Cecil Bloc, including Lord Midleton, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Selborne, Lord

Salisbury, and others. Support for the bill came chiefly from Lord Curzon (Leader in the

Upper House) and Lord Islington (Under Secretary in the India Office).

As a result of this extensive criticism, the bill was revised considerably in the Joint

Committee but emerged with its main outlines unchanged and became law in December

1919. These main outlines, especially the two principles of "dyarchy" and

"responsibility," were, as we have said, highly charged with Curtis's own connotations.

These became fainter as time passed, both because of developments in India and because

Curtis from 1919 on became increasingly remote from Indian affairs. The refusal of the

Indian National Congress under Gandhi's leadership to cooperate in carrying on the

government under the Act of 1919 persuaded the other members of the Group (and

perhaps Curtis himself) that it was not possible to apply responsible government on the

British model to India. This point of view, which had been stated so emphatically by

members of the Cecil Bloc even before 1900, and which formed the chief argument

against the Act of 1919 in the debates in the House of Lords, was accepted by the Milner

Group as their own after 1919. Halifax, Grigg, Amery, Coupland, Fisher, and others

stated this most emphatically from the early 1920s to the middle 1940s. In 1943 Grigg

stated this as a principle in his book The British Commonwealth and quoted with approval

Amery's statement of 30 March 1943 to the House of Commons, rejecting the British

parliamentary system as suitable for India. Amery, at that time Secretary of State for

India, had said: "Like wasps buzzing angrily up and down against a window pane when

an adjoining window may be wide open, we are all held up, frustrated and irritated by the

unrealized and unsuperable barrier of our constitutional prepossessions." Grigg went even

further, indeed, so far that we might suspect that he was deprecating the use of

parliamentary government in general rather than merely in India. He said:

“It is entirely devoid of flexibility and quite incapable of engendering the essential

spirit of compromise in countries where racial and communal divisions present the

principal political difficulty. The idea that freedom to be genuine must be accommodated

to this pattern is deeply rooted in us, and we must not allow our statesmanship to be

imprisoned behind the bars of our own experience. Our insistence in particular on the

principle of a common roll of electors voting as one homogeneous electorate has caused

reaction in South Africa, rebellion or something much too like it in Kenya, and deadlock

in India, because in the different conditions of those countries it must involve the

complete and perpetual dominance of a single race or creed.”

Unfortunately, as Reginald Coupland has pointed out in his book, India, a Re-

statement (1945), all agreed that the British system of government was unsuited to India,

but none made any effort to find an indigenous system that would be suitable. The result

was that the Milner Group and their associates relaxed in their efforts to prepare Indians

to live under a parliamentary system and finally cut India loose without an indigenous

system and only partially prepared to manage a parliamentary system.

This decline in enthusiasm for a parliamentary system in India was well under way by

1921. In the two year-interval from 1919 to 1921, the Group continued as the most

important British factor in Indian affairs. Curtis was editor of The Round Table in this

period and continued to agitate the cause of the Act of 1919. Lord Chelmsford remained a

Viceroy in this period. Meston and Hailey were raised to the Viceroy's Executive

Council. Sir William Duke became Permanent Under Secretary, and Sir Malcolm Seton

became Assistant Under Secretary in the India Office. Sir William Marris was made

Home Secretary of the Government of India and Special Reforms Commissioner in

charge of setting up the new system. L. F. Rushbrook Williams was given special duty at

the Home Department, Government of India, in connection with the reforms. Thus the

Milner Group was well placed to put the new law into effect. The effort was largely

frustrated by Gandhi's boycott of the elections under the new system. By 1921 the Milner

Group had left Indian affairs and shifted its chief interest to other fields. Curtis became

one of the chief factors in Irish affairs in 1921; Lord Chelmsford returned home and was

raised to a Viscounty in the same year; Meston retired in 1919; Marris became Governor

of Assam in 1921; Hailey became Governor of the Punjab in 1924; Duke died in 1924;

and Rushbrook Williams became director of the Central Bureau of Information,

Government of India, in 1920.

This does not indicate that the Milner Group abandoned all interest in India by 1924 or

earlier, but the Group never showed such concentrated interest in the problem of India

again. Indeed, the Group never displayed such concentrated interest in any problem either

earlier or later, with the single exception of the effort to form the Union of South Africa

in 1908-1909.

The decade 1919-1929 was chiefly occupied with efforts to get Gandhi to permit the

Indian National Congress to cooperate in the affairs of government, so that its members

and other Indians could acquire the necessary experience to allow the progressive

realization of self-government. The Congress Party, as we have said, boycotted the

elections of 1920 and cooperated in those of 1924 only for the purpose of wrecking them.

Nonetheless, the system worked, with the support of moderate groups, and the British

extended one right after another in steady succession. Fiscal autonomy was granted to

India in 1921, and that country at once adopted a protective tariff, to the considerable

injury of British textile manufacturing. The superior Civil Services were opened to

Indians in 1924. Indians were admitted to Woolwich and Sandhurst in the same year, and

commissions in the Indian Army were made available to them.

The appointment of Baron Irwin of the Milner Group to be Viceroy in 1926—an

appointment in which, according to A. C. Johnson's biography Viscount Halifax (1941),

"the influence of Geoffrey Dawson and other members of The Times' editorial staff" may

have played a decisive role—was the chief step in the effort to achieve some real

progress under the Act of 1919 before that Act came under the critical examination of

another Royal Commission, scheduled for 1929. The new Viceroy's statement of policy,

made in India, 17 July 1926, was, according to the same source, embraced by The Times

in an editorial "which showed in no uncertain terms that Irwin's policy was appreciated

and underwritten by Printing House Square."

Unfortunately, in the period 1924-1931 the India Office was not in control of either

the Milner Group or Cecil Bloc. For various reasons, of which this would seem to be the

most important, coordination between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy and between

Britain and the Indian nationalists broke down at the most crucial moments. The Milner

Group, chiefly through The Times, participated in this situation in the period 1926-1929

by praising their man, Lord Irwin, and adversely criticizing the Secretary of State, Lord

Birkenhead. Relationships between Birkenhead and the Milner (and Cecil) Group had not

been cordial for a long time, and there are various indications of feuding from at least

1925. We may recall that in April 1925 a secret, or at least unofficial, "committee" of

Milner Group and Cecil Bloc members had nominated Lord Milner for the post of

Chancellor of Oxford University. Lord Birkenhead had objected both to the candidate

and to the procedure. In regard to the candidate, he would have preferred Asquith. In

regard to the procedure, he demanded to know by what authority this "committee" took

upon itself the task of naming a chancellor to a university of which he (Lord Birkenhead)

had been High Steward since 1922. This protest, as usual when Englishmen of this social

level are deeply moved, took the form of a letter to The Times. It received a tart answer in

a letter, written in the third person, in which he was informed that this committee had

existed before the World War, and that, when it was reconstituted at the end of the war,

Mr. F. E. Smith had been invited to be a member of it but had not seen fit even to

acknowledge the invitation.

The bad relationship between the Milner Group and Lord Birkenhead was not the

result of such episodes as this but rather, it would seem, based on a personal antipathy

engendered by the character of Lord Birkenhead and especially by his indiscreet and

undiplomatic social life and political activity. Nonetheless, Lord Birkenhead was a man

of unquestioned vigor and ability and a man of considerable political influence from the

day in 1906 when he had won a parliamentary seat for the Conservatives in the face of a

great Liberal tidal wave. As a result, he had obtained the post of Secretary of State for

India in November 1924 at the same time that Leopold Amery went to the Colonial

Office. The episode regarding the Milner candidacy to the Oxford Chancellorship

occurred six months later and was practically a direct challenge from Birkenhead to

Amery, since at that time the latter was Milner's active political lieutenant and one of the

chief movers in the effort to make him Chancellor.

Thus, in the period 1926-1929, the Milner Group held the Viceroy's post but did not

hold the post of Secretary of State. The relationship between these two posts was such

that good government could not be obtained without close cooperation between them.

Such cooperation did not exist in this period. As far as the constitutional development

was concerned, this lack of cooperation appeared in a tendency on the part of the

Secretary of State to continue to seek a solution of the problem along the road marked by

the use of a unilateral British investigatory commission, and a tendency on the part of

Irwin (and the Milner Group) to seek a solution along the newer road of cooperative

discussion with the Indians. These tendencies did not appear as divergent routes until

after the Simon Commission had begun its labors, with the result that accumulating

evidence that the latter road would be used left that unilateral commission in an

unenviable position.

The Government of India Act of 1919 had provided that an investigation should be

made of the functioning of the Act after it had been in effect for ten years. The growing

unrest of the Indians and their failure to utilize the opportunities of the Act of 1919

persuaded many Englishmen (including most of the Milner Group) that the promised

Statutory Commission should begin its work earlier than anticipated and should direct its

efforts rather at finding the basis for a new constitutional system than at examining the

obvious failure of the system provided in 1919.

The first official hint that the date of the Statutory Commission would be moved up

was given by Birkenhead on 30 March 1927, in combination with some rather "arrogant

and patronizing" remarks about Indian politics. The Times, while criticizing Birkenhead

for his additional remarks, took up the suggestion regarding the commission and

suggested in its turn "that the ideal body would consist of judicially minded men who

were able to agree." This is, of course, exactly what was obtained. The authorized

biography Viscount Halifax, whence these quotations have been taken, adds at this point:

"It is interesting to speculate how far Geoffrey Dawson, the Editor, was again expressing

Irwin's thoughts and whether a deliberate ballon d'essai was being put up in favor of Sir

John Simon."

The Simon Commission was exactly what The Times had wanted, a body of

"judicially minded men who were able to agree." Its chairman was the most expensive

lawyer in England, a member of the Cecil Bloc since he was elected to All Souls in 1897,

and in addition a member of the two extraordinary clubs already mentioned, Grillion's

and The Club. Although he was technically a Liberal, his associations and inclinations

were rather on the Conservative side, and it was no surprise in 1931 when he became a

National Liberal and occupied one of the most important seats in the Cabinet, the Foreign

Office. From this time on, he was closely associated with the policies of the Milner

Group and, in view of his personal association with the leaders of the Group in All Souls,

may well be regarded as a member of the Group. As chairman of the Statutory

Commission, he used his legal talents to the full to draw up a report on which all

members of the commission could agree, and it is no small example of his abilities that

he was able to get an unanimous agreement on a program which in outline, if not in all its

details, was just what the Milner Group wanted.

Of the six other members of the Commission, two were Labourite (Clement Attlee and

Vernon Hartshorn). The others were Unionist or Conservative. Viscount Burnham of

Eton and Balliol (1884) had been a Unionist supporter of the Cecil Bloc in Commons

from 1885 to 1906, and his father had been made baronet and baron by Lord Salisbury.

His own title of Viscount came from Lloyd George in 1919.

The fifth member of the Commission, Donald Palmer Howard, Baron Strathcona and

Mount Royal, of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, had no special claim to fame

except that he had been a Unionist M.P. in 1922-1926.

The sixth member, Edward Cecil Cadogan of Eton and Balliol (1904), was the sixth

son of Earl Cadogan and thus the older brother of Sir Alexander Cadogan, British

delegate to the United Nations. Their father, Earl Cadogan, grandnephew of the first

Duke of Wellington, had been Lord Privy Seal in Lord Salisbury's second government

and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in Salisbury's third government. Edward, who was

knighted in 1939, had no special claim to fame except that he was a Unionist M.P. from

1922 to 1935 and was Chairman of the House of Commons under the National

Government of 1931-1935.

The seventh member, George R. Lane-Fox (Baron Bingley since 1933) of Eton and

New College, was a Unionist M.P. from 1906 to 1931 and Secretary of Mines from 1922

to 1928. He is a brother-in-law and lifelong friend of Lord Halifax, having married the

Honourable Mary Wood in 1903.

The most extraordinary fact about the Simon Commission was the lack of

qualification possessed by its members. Except for the undoubted advantages of

education at Eton and Oxford, the members had no obvious claims to membership on any

committee considering Indian affairs. Indeed, not one of the eight members had had any

previous contact with this subject. Nevertheless, the commission produced an enormous

two-volume report which stands as a monumental source book for the study of Indian

problems in this period. When, to the lack of qualifications of its members, we add the

fact that the commission was almost completely boycotted by Indians and obtained its

chief contact with the natives by listening to their monotonous chants of "Simon, go

back," it seems more than a miracle that such a valuable report could have emerged from

their investigations. The explanation is to be found in the fact that they received full

cooperation from the staff of the Government of India, including members of the Milner

Group.

It is clear that by the end of 1928 the Milner Group, as a result of the strong Indian

opposition to the Simon Commission, the internal struggle within that commission

between Simon and Burnham (because of the latter's refusal to go as far as the former

desired in the direction of concessions to the Indians), and their inability to obtain

cooperation from the Secretary of State (as revealed in the steady criticism of Birkenhead

in The Times), had decided to abandon the commission method of procedure in favor of a

round-table method of procedure. It is not surprising that the Round Table Groups should

prefer a roundtable method of procedure even in regard to Indian affairs, where many of

the participants would have relatively little experience in the typical British procedure of

agreement through conference. To the Milner Group, the round-table method was not

only preferable in itself but was made absolutely necessary by the widespread Indian

criticism of the Simon Commission for its exclusively British personnel. This restriction

had been adopted originally on the grounds that only a purely British and purely

parliamentary commission could commit Parliament in some degree to acceptance of the

recommendations of the commission—at least, this was the defense of the restricted

membership made to the Indians by the Viceroy on 8 November 1927. In place of this

argument, the Milner Group now advanced a somewhat more typical idea, namely, that

only Indian participation on a direct and equal basis could commit Indians to any plans

for the future of India. By customary Milner Group reasoning, they decided that the

responsibility placed on Indians by making them participate in the formulation of plans

would moderate the extremism of their demands and bind them to participate in the

execution of these plans after they were enacted into law. This basic idea—that if you

have faith in people, they will prove worthy of that faith, or, expressed in somewhat more

concrete terms, that if you give dissatisfied people voluntarily more than they expect and,

above all, before they really expect to get it, they will not abuse the gift but will be

sobered simultaneously by the weight of responsibility and the sweetness of gratitude—

was an underlying assumption of the Milner Group's activities from 1901 to the present.

Its validity was defended (when proof was demanded) by a historical example—that is,

by contrasting the lack of generosity in Britain's treatment of the American Colonies in

1774 with the generosity in her treatment of the Canadian Colonies in 1839. The contrast

between the "Intolerable Acts" and the Durham Report was one of the basic ideas at the

back of the minds of all the important members of the Milner Group. In many of those

minds, however, this assumption was not based on political history at all but had a more

profound and largely unconscious basis in the teachings of Christ and the Sermon on the

Mount. This was especially true of Lionel Curtis, John Dove, Lord Lothian, and Lord

Halifax. Unless this idea is recognized, it is not possible to see the underlying unity

behind the actions of the Group toward the Boers in 1901-1910, toward India in 1919 and

1935, and toward Hitler in 1934-1939.

These ideas as a justification of concessions to India are to be found in Milner Group

discussions of the Indian problem at all periods, especially just before the Act of 1919. A

decade later they were still exerting their influence. They will be found, for example, in

The Round Table articles on India in September 1930 and March 1931. The earlier

advocated the use of the round-table method but warned that it must be based on

complete equality for the Indian members. It continued: "Indians should share equally

with Great Britain the responsibility for reaching or failing to reach an agreement as to

what the next step in Indian constitutional development should be. It is no longer a

question, as we see it, of Great Britain listening to Indian representatives and then

deciding for herself what the next Indian constitution should be.... The core of the round

table idea is that representative Britons and representative Indians should endeavour to

reach an agreement, on the understanding that if they can reach an agreement, each will

loyally carry it through to completion, as was the case with Ireland in 1922." As seen by

the Milner Group, Britain's responsibility was

“her obligation to help Indians to take maximum responsibility for India's government

on their own shoulders, and to insist on their doing so, not only because it is the right

thing in itself, but because it is the most certain antidote to the real danger of anarchy

which threatens India unless Indians do learn to carry responsibility for government at a

very early date There is less risk in going too fast in agreement and cooperation with

political India than in going at a more moderate pace without its agreement and

cooperation. Indeed, in our view, the most successful foundation for the Round Table

Conference would be that Great Britain should ask the Indian delegates to table agreed

proposals and then do her utmost to accept them and place on Indian shoulders the

responsibility for carrying them into effect.”

It is very doubtful if the Milner Group could have substituted the round-table method

for the commission method in quite so abrupt a fashion as it did, had not a Labour

government come to office early in 1929. As a result, the difficult Lord Birkenhead was

replaced as Secretary of State by the much more cooperative Mr. Wedgewood Benn

(Viscount Stansgate since 1941). The greater degree of cooperation which the Milner

Group received from Benn than from Birkenhead may be explained by the fact that their

hopes for India were not far distant from those held in certain circles of the Labour Party.

It may also be explained by the fact that Wedgewood Benn was considerably closer, in a

social sense, to the Milner Group than was Birkenhead. Benn had been a Liberal M.P.

from 1906 to 1927; his brother Sir Ernest Benn, the publisher, had been close to the

Milner Group in the Ministry of Munitions in 1916-1917 and in the Ministry of

Reconstruction in 1917-1918; and his nephew John, oldest son of Sir Ernest, married the

oldest daughter of Maurice Hankey in 1929. Whatever the cause, or combination of

causes, Lord Irwin's suggestion that the round-table method be adopted was accepted by

the Labour government. The suggestion was made when the Viceroy returned to London

in June 1929, months before the Simon Report was drafted and a year before it was

published. With this suggestion Lord Irwin combined another, that the government

formally announce that its goal for India was "Dominion status." The plan leaked out,

probably because the Labour government had to consult with the Liberal Party, on which

its majority depended. The Liberals (Lord Reading and Lloyd George) advised against

the announcement, but Irwin was instructed to make it on his return to India in October.

Lord Birkenhead heard of the plan and wrote a vigorous letter of protest to The Times.

When Geoffrey Dawson refused to publish it, it appeared in the Daily Telegraph, thus

repeating the experience of Lord Lansdowne's even more famous letter of 1917.

Lord Irwin's announcement of the Round Table Conference and of the goal of

Dominion status, made in India on 31 October 1929, brought a storm of protest in

England. It was rejected by Lord Reading

and Lloyd George for the Liberals and by Lord Birkenhead and Stanley Baldwin for the

Conservatives. It is highly unlikely that the Milner Group were much disturbed by this

storm. The reason is that the members of the Croup had already decided that "Dominion

status" had two meanings—one meaning for Englishmen, and a second, rather different,

meaning for Indians. As Lord Irwin wrote in a private memorandum in November 1929:

“To the English conception, Dominion Status now connotes, as indeed the word itself

implies, an achieved constitutional position of complete freedom and immunity from

interference by His Majesty's Government in London.... The Indian seems generally to

mean something different. . . . The underlying element in much of Indian political

thought seems to have been the desire that, by free conference between Great Britain and

India, a constitution should be fashioned which may contain within itself the seed of full

Dominion Status, growing naturally to its full development in accordance with the

particular circumstances of India, without the necessity—the implications of which the

Indian mind resents—of further periodic enquiries by way of Commission. What is to the

Englishman an accomplished process is to the Indian rather a declaration of right, from

which future and complete enjoyment of Dominion privilege will spring.” (3)

This distinction, without any reference to Lord Irwin (whose memorandum was not

published until 1941), was also made in the September 1930 issue of The Round Table.

On this basis, for the sake of appeasement of India, the Milner Group was willing to

promise India "Dominion status" in the Indian meaning of the expression and allow the

English who misunderstood to cool off gradually as they saw that the development was

not the one they had feared. Indeed, to the Milner Group, it probably appeared that the

greater the rage in Britain, the greater the appeasement in India.

Accordingly, the first session of the Round Table Conference was called for

November 1930. It marked an innovation not only because of the status of equality and

responsibility which it placed on the Indians, but also because, for the first time, it tried to

settle the problem of the Indian States within the same framework as it settled the

constitutional problem of British India. This was a revolutionary effort, and its degree of

success was very largely due to the preparatory work of Lord Irwin, acting on the advice

of Malcolm Hailey.

The Indian States had remained as backward, feudalistic, and absolutist enclaves,

within the territorial extent of British India and bound to the British Raj by individual

treaties and agreements. As might be expected from the Milner Group, the solution which

they proposed was federation. They hoped that devolution in British India would secure a

degree of provincial autonomy that would make it possible to bind the provinces and the

Indian States within the same federal structure and with similar local autonomy.

However, the Group knew that the Indian States could not easily be federated with

British India until their systems of government were raised to some approximation of the

same level. For this reason, and to win the Princes over to federation, Lord Irwin had a

large number of personal consultations with the Princes in 1927 and 1928. At some of

these he lectured the Princes on the principles of good government in a fashion which

came straight from the basic ideology of the Milner Group. The memorandum which he

presented to them, dated 14 June 1927 and published in Johnson's biography, Viscount

Halifax, could have been written by the Kindergarten. This can be seen in its definitions

of the function of government, its emphasis on the reign of law, its advocacy of

devolution, its homily on the duty of princes, its separation of responsibility in

government from democracy in government, and its treatment of democracy as an

accidental rather than an essential characteristic of good government.

The value of this preparatory work appeared at the first Round Table Conference,

where, contrary to all expectations, the Indian Princes accepted federation. The optimism

resulting from this agreement was, to a considerable degree, dissipated, however, by the

refusal of Gandhi's party to participate in the conference unless India were granted full

and immediate Dominion status. Refusal of these terms resulted in an outburst of political

activity which made it necessary for Irwin to find jails capable of holding sixty thousand

Indian agitators at one time.

The view that the Round Table Conference represented a complete repudiation of the

Simon Commission's approach to the Indian problem was assiduously propagated by the

Milner Group in order to prevent Indian animosity against the latter from being carried

over against the former. But the differences were in detail, since in main outline both

reflected the Group's faith in federation, devolution, responsibility, and minority rights.

The chief recommendations of the Simon Commission were three in number: (1) to

create a federation of British India and the Indian States by using the provinces of the

former as federative units with the latter; (2) to modify the central government by making

the Legislative Assembly a federal organization but otherwise leave the center

unchanged; (3) to end dyarchy in the provinces by making Indians responsible for all

provincial activities. It also advocated separation of Burma from India.

These were also the chief conclusions of the various Round Table Conferences and of

the government's White Papers of December 1931 (Cmd. 3972) and of March 1933

(Cmd. 4268). The former was presented to Parliament and resulted in a debate and vote

of confidence on the government's policy in India as stated in it. The attack was led by

Winston Churchill in the Commons and by Lords Lloyd, Salisbury, Midleton, and

Sumner in the House of Lords. None of these except Churchill openly attacked the

government's policy, the others contenting themselves with advising delay in its

execution. The government was defended by Samuel Hoare, John Simon, and Stanley

Baldwin in the Commons and by Lords Lothian, Irwin, Zetland, Dufferin, and Hailsham,

as well as Archbishop Lang, in the Lords. Lord Lothian, in opening the debate, said that

while visiting in India in 1912 he had written an article for an English review saying that

the Indian Nationalist movement "was essentially healthy, for it was a movement for

political virtue and self-respect," although the Indian Civil Servant with whom he was

staying said that Indian Nationalism was sedition. Lord Lothian implied that he had not

changed his opinion twenty years later. In the Lower House the question came to a vote,

which the government easily carried by 369 to 43. In the majority were Leopold Amery,

John J. Astor, John Buchan, Austen Chamberlain, Viscount Cranborne, Samuel Hoare,

W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, Lord Eustace Percy, John Simon, and D. B. Somervell. In the

minority were Churchill, George Balfour, and Viscount Wolmer.

Practically the same persons appeared on the same sides in the discussion regarding

the White Paper of 1933. This document, which embodied the government's suggestions

for a bill on Indian constitutional reform, was defended by various members of the

Milner Group outside of Parliament, and anonymously in The Round Table. John Buchan

wrote a preface to John Thompson's India: The White Paper (1933), in which he

defended the extension of responsible government to India, saying, "We cannot exclude

her from sharing in what we ourselves regard as the best." Samuel Hoare defended it in a

letter to his constituents at Chelsea. Malcolm Hailey defended it before the Royal Empire

Society Summer School at Oxford, in a speech afterwards published in The Asiatic

Review. Hailey had resigned as Governor of the United Provinces in India in order to

return to England to help the government put through its bill. During the long period

required to accomplish this, Samuel Hoare, who as Secretary of State for India was the

official government spokesman on the subject, had Hailey constantly with him as his

chief adviser and support. It was this support that permitted Hoare, whose knowledge of

India was definitely limited, to conduct his astounding campaign for the Act of 1935.

The White Paper of 1933 was presented to a Joint Select Committee of both Houses. It

was publicly stated as a natural action on the part of the government that this committee

be packed with supporters of the bill. For this reason Churchill, George Balfour, and Lord

Wolmer refused to serve on it, although Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour Member who

opposed the bill, asked to be put on the committee because it was packed.

The Joint Select Committee, as we have seen, had thirty-two members, of whom at

least twelve were from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group and supported the bill. Four

were from the inner circles of the Milner Group. The chief witnesses were Sir Samuel

Hoare; who gave testimony for twenty days; Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who gave testimony

for four days; and Winston Churchill, who gave testimony for three days. The chief

witness was thus Hoare, who answered 5594 questions from the committee. At all times

Hoare had Malcolm Hailey at his side for advice.

The fashion in which the government conducted the Joint Select Committee aroused a

good deal of unfavorable comment. Lord Rankeillour in the House of Lords criticized

this, especially the fashion in which Hoare used his position to push his point of view and

to influence the evidence which the committee received from other witnesses. He

concluded: "This Committee was not a judicial body, and its conclusions are vitiated

thereby. You may say that on their merits they have produced a good or a bad Report, but

what you cannot say is that the Report is the judicial finding of unbiased or impartial

minds." As a result of such complaints, the House of Commons Committee on Privilege

investigated the conduct of the Joint Select Committee. It found that Hoare's actions

toward witnesses and in regard to documentary evidence could be brought within the

scope of the Standing Orders of the House if a distinction were made between judicial

committees and non-judicial committees and between witnesses giving facts and giving

opinions. These distinctions made it possible to acquit Sir Samuel of any violation of

privilege, but aroused such criticism that a Select Committee on Witnesses was formed to

examine the rules for dealing with witnesses. In its report, on 4 June 1935, this Select

Committee rejected the validity of the distinctions between judicial and non-judicial and

between fact and opinion made by the Committee on Privilege, and recommended that

the Standing Rules be amended to forbid any tampering with documents that had been

received by a committee. The final result was a formal acquittal, but a moral

condemnation, of Hoare's actions in regard to the Joint Select Committee on the

Government of India.

The report of the Joint Select Committee was accepted by nineteen out of its thirty-

two members. Nine voted against it (five Conservative and four Labour Members). A

motion to accept the report and ask the government to proceed to draw up a bill based on

it was introduced in the House of Lords by the President of the Board of Education, Lord

Halifax (Lord Irwin), on 12 December 1934, in a typical Milner Group speech. He said:

"As I read it, the whole of our British and Imperial experience shouts at us the warning

that representative government without responsibility, once political consciousness has

been aroused, is apt to be a source of great weakness and, not impossibly, great danger.

We had not learned that lesson, let me remind the House, in the eighteenth century, and

we paid very dearly for it. We learned it some sixty years later and, by having learned it,

we transformed the face and history of Canada." Lord Salisbury once again advised

delay, and attacked the idea that parliamentary government could work in India or indeed

had worked anywhere outside the British Commonwealth. Lord Snell, speaking for the

Labour opposition, objected to the lack of protection against economic exploitation for

the Indian masses, the omission of any promise of Dominion status for India, the

weighing of the franchise too heavily on the side of the landlords and too lightly on the

side of women or of laborers, the provisions for a second chamber, and the use of indirect

election for the first chamber. Lord Lothian answered both speakers, supporting only one

criticism, that against indirect election to the central assembly. He made the significant

statement that he did not fear to turn India over to the Congress Party of Gandhi because

(1) "though I disagree with almost everything that they say in public and most of their

political programme, I have a sneaking sympathy with the emotion which lies underneath

them . . . the aspiration of young impetuous India anxious to take responsibility on its

own shoulders"; and (2) "because I believe that the one political lesson, which has more

often been realized in the British Commonwealth of Nations than anywhere else in the

world, is that the one corrective of political extremism is to put responsibility upon the

extremists, and, by these proposals, that is exactly what we are doing." These are typical

Milner Group reasons.

In the debate, Halifax was supported by Archbishop Lang and Lords Zetland,

Linlithgow, Midleton, Hardinge of Penshurst, Lytton, and Reading. Lord Salisbury was

supported by Lords Phillimore, Rankeillour, Ampthill, and Lloyd. In the division,

Salisbury's motion for delay was beaten by 239 to 62. In addition to the lords mentioned,

the majority included Lords Dufferin, Linlithgow, Cranbrook, Cobham, Cecil of

Chelwood, Goschen, Hampden, Elton, Lugard, Meston, and Wemyss, while the minority

included Lords Birkenhead, Westminster, Carnock, Islington, and Leconfield. It is clear

that the Milner Group voted completely with the majority, while the Cecil Bloc was split.

The bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 6 February 1935 by Sir Samuel

Hoare. As was to be expected, his argument was based on the lessons to be derived from

the error of 1774 and the success of 1839 in North America. The government's actions, he

declared, were based on "plain, good intentions." He was mildly criticized from the left

by Attlee and Sir Herbert Samuel; supported by Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, Sir Edward

Grigg, and others; and then subjected to a long-sustained barrage from Winston

Churchill. Churchill had already revealed his opinion of the bill over the BBC when he

said, on 29 January 1935, that it was "a monstrous monument of sham built by the

pygmies." He continued his attack in a similar vein, with the result that almost every

government speaker felt the need to caution him that his intemperance was hurting his

own cause. From our point of view, his most interesting statement, and one which was

not contradicted, said: "I have watched this story from its very unfolding, and what has

struck me more than anything else about it has been the amazingly small number of

people who have managed to carry matters to their present lamentable pitch. You could

almost count them on the fingers of one hand. I have also been struck by the prodigious

power which this group of individuals have been able to exert and relay, to use a

mechanical term, through the vast machinery of party, of Parliament, and of patronage,

both here and in the East. It is tragical that they should have been able to mislead the

loyalties and use the assets of the Empire to its own undoing. I compliment them on their

skill, and I compliment them also on their disciples. Their chorus is exceedingly well

drilled." This statement was answered by Lord Eustace Percy, who quoted Lord Hugh

Cecil on "profitable mendacity." This led to an argument, in which both sides appealed to

the Speaker. Order was restored when Lord Eustace said of Churchill, "I would never

impute to him . . . any intention of making a charge which he did not believe himself."

It is quite clear that Churchill believed his charge and was referring to what we have

called the Milner Group, although he would not have known it under that name, nor

would he have realized its extreme ramifications. He was merely referring to the

extensive influence of that close group of associates which included Hoare, Hailey,

Curtis, Lothian, Dawson, Amery, Grigg, and Halifax.

After four days of debate on the second reading, the opposition amendment was

rejected by 404-133, and the bill passed to the committee stage. In the majority were

Amery, Buchan, Grigg, Hoare, Ormsby-Gore, Simon, Sir Donald Somervell, and Steel-

Maitland. The minority consisted of three ill-assorted groups: the followers of Churchill,

the leaders of the Labour Party, and a fragment of the Cecil Bloc with a few others.

The Government of India Act of 1935 was the longest bill ever submitted to

Parliament, and it underwent the longest debate in history (over forty days in Commons).

In general, the government let the opposition talk itself out and then crushed it on each

division. In the third reading, Churchill made his final speech in a tone of baneful

warning regarding the future of India. He criticized the methods of pressure used by

Hoare and said that in ten years' time the Secretary of State would be haunted by what

had been done, and it could be said of him,

"’God save thee, ancient Mariner,

From the fiends that plague thee thus.

Why look'st thou so?’ With my cross-bow,

I shot the Albatross.”

These somber warnings were answered by Leopold Amery, who opened his rejoinder

with the words, "Here endeth the last chapter of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah."

In the House of Lords the bill was taken through its various stages by Lord Zetland

(who replaced Hoare as Secretary of State for India in June 1935), and the final speech

for the government was from Halifax (recently made Secretary of State for War). The Act

received the Royal Assent on 1 August 1935.

The Act never went into effect completely, and by 1939 the Milner Group was

considering abandoning it in favor of complete self-government for India. The portions of

the Act of 1935 dealing with the central government fell to the ground when the refusal

of the Princes of the Indian States to accept the Act made a federal solution impossible.

The provincial portion began to function in 1937, but with great difficulty because of the

extremist agitation from the Congress Party. This party obtained almost half of the seats

in the eleven provinces and had a clear majority in six provinces. The provincial

governments, started in 1937, worked fairly well, and the emergency powers of the

central governments, which continued on the 1919 model, were used only twice in over

two years. When the war began, the Congress Party ordered its ministries to resign. Since

the Congress Party members in the legislatures would not support non-Congress

ministries, the decree powers of the Provincial Governors had to be used in those

provinces with a Congress majority. In 1945 six out of the eleven provinces had

responsible government.

From 1939 on, constitutional progress in India was blocked by a double stalemate: (1)

the refusal of the Congress Party to cooperate in government unless the British

abandoned India completely, something which could not be done while the Japanese

were invading Burma; and (2) the growing refusal of the Moslem League to cooperate

with the Congress Party on any basis except partition of India and complete autonomy for

the areas with Moslem majorities. The Milner Group, and the British government

generally, by 1940 had given up all hope of any successful settlement except complete

self-government for India, but it could not give up to untried hands complete control of

defense policy during the war. At the same time, the Milner Group generally supported

Moslem demands because of its usual emphasis on minority rights.

During this period the Milner Group remained predominant in Indian affairs, although

the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) was not a member of the Group. The Secretary of State for

India, however, was Leopold Amery for the whole period 1940-1945. A number of

efforts were made to reach agreement with the Congress Party, but the completely

unrealistic attitude of the party's leaders, especially Gandhi, made this impossible. In

1941, H. V. Hodson, by that time one of the most important members of the Milner

Group, was made Reforms Commissioner for India. The following year the most

important effort to break the Indian stalemate was made. This was the Cripps Mission,

whose chief adviser was Sir Reginald Coupland, another member of the inner circle of

the Milner Group. As a result of the failure of this mission and of the refusal of the

Indians to believe in the sincerity of the British (a skepticism that was completely without

basis), the situation dragged on until after the War. The election of 1945, which drove the

Conservative Party from office, also removed the Milner Group from its positions of

influence. The subsequent events, including complete freedom for India and the division

of the country into two Dominions within the British Commonwealth, were controlled by

new hands, but the previous actions of the Milner Group had so committed the situation

that these new hands had no possibility (nor, indeed, desire) to turn the Indian problem

into new paths. There can be little doubt that with the Milner Group still in control the

events of 1945-1948 in respect to India would have differed only in details.

The history of British relations with India in the twentieth century was

disastrous. In this history the Milner Group played a major role. To be sure, the

materials with which they had to work were intractable and they had inconvenient

obstacles at home (like the diehards within the Conservative Party), but these problems

were made worse by the misconceptions about India and about human beings held by the

Milner Group. The bases on which they built their policy were fine—indeed, too fine.

These bases were idealistic, almost utopian, to a degree which made it impossible for

them to grow and function and made it highly likely that forces of ignorance and

barbarism would be released, with results exactly contrary to the desires of the Milner

Group. On the basis of love of liberty, human rights, minority guarantees, and self-

responsibility, the Milner Group took actions that broke down the lines of external

authority in Indian society faster than any lines of internal self-discipline were being

created. It is said that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. The road to the

Indian tragedy of 1947-1948 was also paved with good intentions, and

those paving blocks were manufactured and laid down by the Milner Group. The same

good intentions contributed largely to the dissolution of the British Empire, the race wars

of South Africa, and the unleashing of the horrors of 1939-1945 on the world.

To be sure, in India as elsewhere, the Milner Group ran into bad luck for which

they were not responsible. The chief case of this in India was the Amritsar Massacre

of 1919, which was probably the chief reason for Gandhi's refusal to cooperate in

carrying out the constitutional reforms of that same year. But the Milner Group's

policies were self-inconsistent and were unrealistic. For example, they continually

insisted that the parliamentary system was not fitted to Indian conditions, yet they made

no real effort to find a more adaptive political system, and every time they gave India a

further dose of self-government, it was always another dose of the parliamentary system.

But, clinging to their beliefs, they loaded down this system with special devices which

hampered it from functioning as a parliamentary system should. The irony of this whole

procedure rests in the fact that the minority of agitators in India who wanted self-

government wanted it on the parliamentary pattern and regarded every special device and

every statement from Britain that it was not adapted to Indian conditions as an indication

of the insincerity in the British desire to grant self-government to India.

A second error arises from the Milner Group's lack of enthusiasm for democracy.

Democracy, as a form of government, involves two parts: (1) majority rule and (2)

minority rights. Because of the Group's lack of faith in democracy, they held no brief for

the first of these but devoted all their efforts toward achieving the second. The result was

to make the minority uncompromising, at the same time that they diminished the

majority's faith in their own sincerity. In India the result was to make the Moslem League

almost completely obstructionist and make the Congress Party almost completely

suspicious. The whole policy encouraged extremists and discouraged moderates. This

appears at its worst in the systems of communal representation and communal electorates

established in India by Britain. The Milner Group knew these were bad, but felt that they

were a practical necessity in order to preserve minority rights. In this they were not only

wrong, as proved by history, but were sacrificing principle to expediency in a way that

can never be permitted by a group whose actions claim to be so largely dictated by

principle. To do this weakens the faith of others in the group's principles.

The Group made another error in their constant tendency to accept the outcry of a

small minority of Europeanized agitators as the voice of India. The masses of the Indian

people were probably in favor of British rule, for very practical reasons. The British gave

these masses good government through the Indian Civil Service and other services, but

they made little effort to reach them on any human, intellectual, or ideological level. The

"color line" was drawn—not between British and Indians but between British and the

masses, for the educated upperclass Indians were treated as equals in the majority of

cases. The existence of the color line did not bother the masses of the people, but when it

hit one of the educated minority, he forgot the more numerous group of cases where it

had not been applied to him, became anti-British and began to flood the uneducated

masses with a deluge of anti-British propaganda. This could have been avoided to a great

extent by training the British Civil Servants to practice racial toleration toward all classes,

by increasing the proportion of financial expenditure on elementary education while

reducing that on higher education, by using the increased literacy of the masses of the

people to impress on them the good they derived from British rule and to remove those

grosser superstitions and social customs which justified the color line to so many English.

All of these except the last were in accordance with Milner Group ideas. The members of

the Group objected to the personal intolerance of the British in India, and regretted the

disproportionate share of educational expenditure which went to higher education (see

the speech in Parliament of Ormsby-Gore, 11 December 1934), but they continued to

educate a small minority, most of whom became anti-British agitators, and left the

masses of the people exposed to the agitations of that minority. On principle, the Group

would not interfere with the superstitions and grosser social customs of the masses of the

people, on the grounds that to do so would be to interfere with religious freedom. Yet

Britain had abolished suttee, child marriage, and thuggery, which were also religious in

foundation. If the British could have reduced cow-worship, and especially the number of

cows, to moderate proportions, they would have conferred on India a blessing greater

than the abolition of suttee, child marriage, and thuggery together, would have removed

the chief source of animosity between Hindu and Moslem, and would have raised the

standard of living of the Indian people to a degree that would have more than paid for a

system of elementary education.

If all of these things had been done, the agitation for independence could have been

delayed long enough to build up an electorate capable of working a parliamentary system.

Then the parliamentary system, which educated Indians wanted, could have been

extended to them without the undemocratic devices and animadversions against it which

usually accompanied any effort to introduce it on the part of the British.

Chapter 12—Foreign Policy, 1919-1940

Any effort to write an account of the influence exercised by the Milner Group in

foreign affairs in the period between the two World Wars would require a complete

rewriting of the history of that period. This cannot be done within the limits of a single

chapter, and it will not be attempted. Instead, an effort will be made to point out the chief

ideas of the Milner Group in this field, the chief methods by which they were able to

make those ideas prevail, and a few significant examples of how these methods worked

in practice.

The political power of the Milner Group in the period 1919-1939 grew quite steadily.

It can be measured by the number of ministerial portfolios held by members of the

Group. In the first period, 1919-1924, they generally held about one-fifth of the Cabinet

posts. For example, the Cabinet that resigned in January 1924 had nineteen members;

four were of the Milner Group, only one from the inner circle. These four were Leopold

Amery, Edward Wood, Samuel Hoare, and Lord Robert Cecil. In addition, in the same

period other members of the Group were in the government in one position or another.

Among these were Milner, Austen Chamberlain, H. A. L. Fisher, Lord Ernle, Lord Astor,

Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore. Also, relatives of these, such as

Lord Onslow (brother-in-law of Lord Halifax), Captain Lane-Fox (brother-in-law of Lord

Halifax), and Lord Greenwood (brother-in-law of Amery), were in the government.

In this period the influence of the Milner Group was exercised in two vitally

significant political acts. In the first case, the Milner Group appears to have played an

important role behind the scenes in persuading the King to ask Baldwin rather than

Curzon to be Prime Minister in 1923. Harold Nicolson, in Curzon: The Last Phase

(1934), says that Balfour, Amery, and Walter Long intervened with the King to oppose

Curzon, and "the cumulative effect of these representations was to reverse the previous

decision." Of the three names mentioned by Nicolson, two were of the Cecil Bloc, while

the third was Milner's closest associate. If Amery did intervene, he undoubtedly did so as

the representative of Milner, and if Milner opposed Curzon to this extent through Amery,

he was in a position to bring other powerful influences to bear on His Majesty through

Lord Esher as well as through Brand's brother, Viscount Hampden, a lord-in-waiting to

the King, or more directly through Milner's son-in-law, Captain Alexander Hardinge, a

private secretary to the King. In any case, Milner exercised a very powerful influence on

Baldwin during the period of his first government, and it was on Milner's advice that

Baldwin waged the General Election of 1924 on the issue of protection. The election

manifesto issued by the party and advocating a tariff was written by Milner in

consultation with Arthur Steel-Maitland.

In the period 1924-1929 the Milner Group usually held about a third of the seats in the

Cabinet (seven out of twenty-one in the government formed in November 1924). These

proportions were also held in the period 1935-1940, with a somewhat smaller ratio in the

period 1931-1935. In the Cabinet that was formed in the fall of 1931, the Milner Group

exercised a peculiar influence. The Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald was in office

with a minority government from 1929 to September 1931. Toward the end of this

period, the Labour government experienced increasing difficulty because the deflationary

policy of the Bank of England and the outflow of gold from the country were

simultaneously intensifying the depression, increasing unemployment and public

discontent, and jeopardizing the gold standard. In fact, the Bank of England's policy

made it almost impossible for the Labour Party to govern. Without informing his Cabinet,

Ramsay MacDonald entered upon negotiations with Baldwin and King George, as a

result of which MacDonald became Prime Minister of a new government, supported by

Conservative votes in Parliament. The obvious purpose of this intrigue was to split the

Labour Party and place the administration back in Conservative hands.

In this intrigue the Milner Group apparently played an important, if secret, role. That

they were in a position to play such a role is clear. We have mentioned the pressure

which the bankers were putting on the Labour government in the period 1929-1931. The

Milner Group were clearly in a position to influence this pressure. E. R. Peacock

(Parkin's old associate) was at the time a director of the Bank of England and a director of

Baring Brothers; Robert Brand, Thomas Henry Brand, and Adam Marris (son of Sir

William Marris) were all at Lazard and Brothers; Robert Brand was also a director of

Lloyd's Bank; Lord Selborne was a director of Lloyd's Bank; Lord Lugard was a director

of Barclay's Bank; Major Astor was a director of Hambros Bank; and Lord Goschen was

a director of the Westminster Bank.

We have already indicated the ability of the Milner Group to influence the King in

respect to the choice of Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1923. By 1931 this power was even

greater. Thus the Milner Group was in a position to play a role in the intrigue of 1931.

That they may have done so is to be found in the fact that two of the important figures in

this intrigue within the Labour Party were ever after closely associated with the Milner

Group. These two were Malcolm MacDonald and Godfrey Elton.

Malcolm MacDonald, son and intimate associate of Ramsay MacDonald, clearly

played an important role in the intrigue of 1931. He was rewarded with a position in the

new government and has never been out of office since. These offices included

Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Dominions Office (1931-1935), Secretary of State

for the Dominions (1935-1938 and 1938-1939), Secretary of State for the Colonies

(1935-and 1938-1940), Minister of Health (1940-1941), United Kingdom High

Commissioner in Canada (1941-1946), Governor-General of Malaya and British South-

East Asia (since 1946). Since all of these offices but one (Minister of Health) were

traditionally in the sphere of the Milner Group, and since Malcolm MacDonald during

this period was closely associated with the Group in its other activities, such as Chatham

House and the unofficial British Commonwealth relations conferences, Malcolm

MacDonald should probably be regarded as a member of the Group from about 1932

onward.

Godfrey Elton (Lord Elton since 1934), of Rugby and Balliol, was a Fellow of

Queen's College, Oxford, from 1919, as well as lecturer on Modern History at Oxford. In

this role Elton came in contact with Malcolm MacDonald, who was an undergraduate at

Queen's in the period 1920-1925. Through this connection, Elton ran for Parliament on

the Labour Party ticket in 1924 and again in 1929, both times without success. He was

more successful in establishing himself as an intellectual leader of the Labour Party,

capping this by publishing in 1931 a study of the early days of the party. As a close

associate of the MacDonald family, he supported the intrigue of 1931 and played a part in

it. For this he was expelled from the party and became honorary political secretary of the

new National Labour Committee and editor of its News-Letter (1932-1938). He was

made a baron in 1934, was on the Ullswater Committee on the Future of Broadcasting the

following year, and in 1939 succeeded Lord Lothian as Secretary to the Rhodes Trustees.

By his close association with the MacDonald family, he became the obvious choice to

write the "official" life of J. R. (Ramsey) MacDonald, the first volume of which was

published in 1939. In 1945 he published a history of the British Empire called Imperial

Commonwealth.

After the election of 1935, the Milner Group took a substantial part in the government,

with possession of seven places in a Cabinet of twenty-one seats. By the beginning of

September of 1939, they had only five out of twenty-three, the decrease being caused, as

we shall see, by the attrition within the Group on the question of appeasement. In the War

Cabinet formed at the outbreak of the war, they had four out of nine seats. In this whole

period from 1935 to 1940, the following members of the Group were associated with the

government as officers of state: Halifax, Simon, Malcolm MacDonald, Zetland, Ormsby-

Gore, Hoare, Somervell, Lothian, Hankey, Grigg, Salter, and Amery.

It would appear that the Milner Group increased its influence on the government until

about 1938. We have already indicated the great power which they exercised in the

period 1915-1919. This influence, while great, was neither decisive nor preponderant. At

the time, the Milner Group was sharing influence with at least two other groups and was,

perhaps, the least powerful of the three. It surely was less powerful than the Cecil Bloc,

even as late as 1929, and was less powerful, perhaps, than the rather isolated figure of

Lloyd George as late as 1922. These relative degrees of power on the whole do not

amount to very much, because the three that we have mentioned generally agreed on

policy. When they disagreed, the views of the Milner Group did not usually prevail.

There were two reasons for this. Both the Cecil Bloc and Lloyd George were susceptible

to pressure from the British electorate and from the allies of Britain. The Milner Group,

as a non-elected group, could afford to be disdainful of the British electorate and of

French opinion, but the persons actually responsible for the government, like Lloyd

George, Balfour, and others, could not be so casual. As a consequence, the Milner Group

were bitterly disappointed over the peace treaty with Germany and over the Covenant of

the League of Nations. This may seem impossible when we realize how much the Group

contributed to both of these. For they did contribute a great deal, chiefly because of the

fact that the responsible statesmen generally accepted the opinion of the experts on the

terms of the treaty, especially the territorial terms. There is only one case where the

delegates overruled a committee of experts that was unanimous, and that was the case of

the Polish Corridor, where the experts were more severe with Germany than the final

agreement. The experts, thus, were of very great importance, and among the experts the

Milner Group had an important place, as we have seen. It would thus seem that the

Milner Group's disappointment with the peace settlement was largely criticism of their

own handiwork. To a considerable extent this is true. The explanation lies in the fact that

much of what they did as experts was done on instructions from the responsible delegates

and the fact that the Group ever after had a tendency to focus their eyes on the few

blemishes of the settlement, to the complete neglect of the much

larger body of acceptable decisions. Except for this, the Group could have no justification

for their dissatisfaction except as self-criticism. When the original draft of the Treaty of

Versailles was presented to the Germans on 7 May 1919, the defeated delegates were

aghast at its severity. They drew up a detailed criticism of 443 pages. The answer to this

protest, making a few minor changes in the treaty but allowing the major provisions to

stand, was drafted by an inter-allied committee of five, of which Philip Kerr was the

British member. The changes that were made as concessions to the Germans were made

under pressure from Lloyd George, who was himself under pressure from the Milner

Group. This appears clearly from the minutes of the Council of Four at the Peace

Conference. The first organized drive to revise the draft of the treaty in the direction of

leniency was made by Lloyd George at a meeting of the Council of Four on 2 June 1919.

The Prime Minister said he had been consulting with his delegation and with the Cabinet.

He specifically mentioned George Barnes ("the only Labour representative in his

Cabinet"), the South African delegation (who"were also refusing to sign the present

Treaty"), Mr. Fisher ("whose views carried great weight"), Austen Chamberlain, Lord

Robert Cecil, and both the Archbishops. Except for Barnes and the Archbishops, all of

these were close to the Milner Group. The reference to H. A. L. Fisher is especially

significant, for Fisher's views could "carry great weight" only insofar as he was a member

of the Milner Group. The reference to the South African delegation meant Smuts, for

Botha was prepared to sign, no matter what he felt about the treaty, in order to win for his

country official recognition as a Dominion of equal status with Britain. Smuts, on the

other hand, refused to sign from the beginning and, as late as 23 June 1919, reiterated his

refusal (according to Mrs. Millen's biography of Smuts).

Lloyd George's objections to the treaty as presented in the Council of Four on 2 June

were those which soon became the trademark of the Milner Group. In addition to

criticisms of the territorial clauses on the Polish frontier and a demand for a plebiscite in

Upper Silesia, the chief objections were aimed at reparations and the occupation of the

Rhineland. On the former point, Lloyd George's advisers"thought that more had been

asked for than Germany could pay." On the latter point, which "was the main British

concern," his advisers were insistent. "They urged that when the German Army was

reduced to a strength of 100,000 men it was ridiculous to maintain an army of occupation

of 200,000 men on the Rhine. They represented that it was only a method of quartering

the French Army on Germany and making Germany pay the cost. It had been pointed out

that Germany would not constitute a danger to France for 30 years or even 50 years;

certainly not in 15 years.... The advice of the British military authorities was that two

years was the utmost limit of time for the occupation."

To these complaints, Clemenceau had replied that "in England the view seemed to

prevail that the easiest way to finish the war was by making concessions. In France the

contrary view was held that it was best to act firmly. The French people, unfortunately,

knew the Germans very intimately, and they believed that the more concessions we

made, the more the Germans would demand.... He recognized that Germany was not an

immediate menace to France. But Germany would sign the Treaty with every intention of

not carrying it out. Evasions would be made first on one point and then on another. The

whole Treaty would go by the board if there were not some guarantees such as were

provided by the occupation."' (1)

Under such circumstances as these, it seems rather graceless for the Milner Group to

have started at once, as it did, a campaign of recrimination against the treaty. Philip Kerr

was from 1905 to his death in 1940 at the very center of the Milner Group. His violent

Germanophobia in 1908-1918, and his evident familiarity with the character of the

Germans and with the kind of treaty which they would have imposed on Britain had the

roles been reversed, should have made the Treaty of Versailles very acceptable to him

and his companions, or, if not, unacceptable on grounds of excessive leniency. Instead,

Kerr, Brand, Curtis, and the whole inner core of the Milner Group began a campaign to

undermine the treaty, the League of Nations, and the whole peace settlement. Those who

are familiar with the activities of the "Cliveden Set" in the 1930s have generally felt that

the appeasement policy associated with that group was a manifestation of the period after

1934 only. This is quite mistaken. The Milner Group, which was the reality behind the

phantom-like Cliveden Set, began their program of appeasement and revision of the

settlement as early as 1919. Why did they do this?

To answer this question, we must fall back on the statements of the members of the

Group, general impressions of their psychological outlook, and even a certain amount of

conjecture. The best statement of what the Group found objectionable in the peace of

1919 will be found in a brilliant book of Zimmern's called Europe in Convalescence

(1922). More concrete criticism, especially in regard to the Covenant of the League, will

be found in The Round Table. And the general mental outlook of the Group in 1919 will

be found in Harold Nicolson's famous book Peace-Making. Nicolson, although on close

personal relationships with most of the inner core of the Milner Group, was not a member

of the Group himself, but his psychology in 1918-1920 was similar to that of the

members of the inner core.

In general, the members of this inner core took the propagandist slogans of 1914-1918

as a truthful picture of the situation. I have indicated how the Group had worked out a

theory of history that saw the whole past in terms of a long struggle between the forces of

evil and the forces of righteousness. The latter they defined at various times as "the rule

of law" (a la Dicey), as "the subordination of each to the welfare of all," as "democracy,"

etc. They accepted Wilson's identification of his war aims with his war slogans ("a world

safe for democracy," "a war to end wars," "a war to end Prussianism," "self-

determination," etc.) as meaning what they meant by "the rule of law." They accepted his

Fourteen Points (except "freedom of the seas") as implementation of these aims.

Moreover, the Milner Group, and apparently Wilson, made an assumption which had a

valid basis but which could be very dangerous if carried out carelessly. This was the

assumption that the Germans were divided into two groups, "Prussian autocrats" and

"good Germans." They assumed that, if the former group were removed from positions of

power and influence, and magnanimous concessions were made to the latter, Germany

could be won over on a permanent basis from "Asiatic despotism" to "Western

civilization." In its main outlines, the thesis was valid. But difficulties were numerous.

In the first place, it is not possible to distinguish between "good" Germans and "bad"

Germans by any objective criterion. The distinction certainly could not be based on who

was in public office in 1914-1918. In fact, the overwhelming mass of Germans—almost

all the middle classes, except a few intellectuals and very religious persons; a

considerable portion of the aristocratic class (at least half); and certain segments of the

working class (about one-fifth)—were "bad" Germans in the sense in which the Milner

Group used that expression. In their saner moments, the Group knew this. In December

1918, Curtis wrote in The Round Table on this subject as follows: "No one class, but the

nation itself was involved in the sin. There were Socialists who licked their lips over

Brest-Litovsk. All but a mere remnant, and those largely in prison or exile, accepted or

justified the creed of despotism so long as it promised them the mastery of the world. The

German People consented to be slaves in their own house as the price of enslaving

mankind." If these words had been printed and posted on the walls of All Souls, of

Chatham House, of New College, of The Times office in Printing House Square, and of

The Round Table office at 175 Piccadilly, there need never have been a Second World

War with Germany. But these words were not remembered by the Group. Instead, they

assumed that the "bad" Germans were the small group that was removed from office in

1918 with the Kaiser. They did not see that the Kaiser was merely a kind of facade for

four other groups: The Prussian Officers' Corps, the Junker landlords, the governmental

bureaucracy (especially the administrators of police and justice), and the great

industrialists. They did not see that these four had been able to save themselves in 1918

by jettisoning the Kaiser, who had become a liability. They did not see that these four

were left in their positions of influence, with their power practically intact—indeed, in

many ways with their power greater than ever, since the new "democratic" politicians like

Ebert, Scheidemann, and Noske were much more subservient to the four groups than the

old imperial authorities had ever been. General Gröner gave orders to Ebert over his

direct telephone line from Kassel in a tone and with a directness that he would never have

used to an imperial chancellor. In a word, there was no revolution in Germany in 1918.

The Milner Group did not see this, because they did not want to see it. Not that they were

not warned. Brigadier General John H. Morgan, who was almost a member of the Group

and who was on the Inter-allied Military Commission of Control in Germany in 1919-

1923, persistently warned the government and the Group of the continued existence and

growing power of the German Officers' Corps and of the unreformed character of the

German people. As a graduate of Balliol and the University of Berlin (1897-1905), a

leader-writer on The Manchester Guardian (1904-1905), a Liberal candidate for

Parliament with Amery in 1910, an assistant adjutant general with the military section of

the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919, the British member on the

Prisoners of War Commission (1919), legal editor of The Encyclopedia Britannica (14th

edition), contributor to The Times, reader in constitutional law to the Inns of Court (1926-

1936), Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of London, Rhodes Lecturer at

London (1927-1932), counsel to the Indian Chamber of Princes (1934-1937), counsel to

the Indian State of Gwalior, Tagore Professor at Calcutta (1939)—as all of these things,

and thus close to many members of the Group, General Morgan issued warnings about

Germany that should have been heeded by the Group. They were not. No more attention

was paid to them than was paid to the somewhat similar warnings coming from Professor

Zimmern. And the general, with less courage than the professor, or perhaps with more of

that peculiar group loyalty which pervades his social class in England, kept his warnings

secret and private for years. Only in October 1924 did he come out in public with an

article in the Quarterly Review on the subject, and only in 1945 did he find a wider

platform in a published book ( Assize of Arms), but in neither did he name the persons

who were suppressing the warnings in his official reports from the Military Commission.

In a similar fashion, the Milner Group knew that the industrialists, the Junkers,

the police, and the judges were cooperating with the reactionaries to suppress all

democratic and enlightened elements in Germany and to help all the forces of

"despotism" and "sin" (to use Curtis's words). The Group refused to recognize these

facts. For this, there were two reasons. One, for which Brand was chiefly responsible,

was based on certain economic assumptions. Among these, the chief was the belief that

"disorder" and social unrest could be avoided only if prosperity were restored to Germany

as soon as possible. By "disorder," Brand meant such activities as were associated with

Trotsky in Russia, Béla Kun in Hungary, and the Spartacists or Kurt Eisner in Germany.

To Brand, as an orthodox international banker, prosperity could be obtained only by an

economic system under the control of the old established industrialists and bankers. This

is perfectly clear from Brand's articles in The Round Table, reprinted in his book, War

and National Finance (1921). Moreover, Brand felt confident that the old economic

groups could reestablish prosperity quickly only if they were given concessions in respect

to Germany's international financial position by lightening the weight of reparations on

Germany and by advancing credit to Germany, chiefly from the United States. This point

of view was not Brand's alone. It dominated the minds of all international bankers from

Thomas Lamont to Montague Norman and from 1918 to at least 1931. The importance of

Brand, from out point of view, lies in the fact that, as "the economic expert" of the Milner

Group and one of the leaders of the Group, he brought this point of view into the Group

and was able to direct the great influence of the Group in this direction.(2)

Blindness to the real situation in Germany was also encouraged from another point of

view. This was associated with Philip Kerr. Roughly, this point of view advocated a

British foreign policy based on the old balance-of-power system. Under that old system,

which Britain had followed since 1500, Britain should support the second strongest

power on the Continent against the strongest power, to prevent the latter from obtaining

supremacy on the Continent. For one brief moment in 1918, the Group toyed with the

idea of abandoning this traditional policy; for one brief moment they felt that if Europe

were given self-determination and parliamentary governments, Britain could permit some

kind of federated or at least cooperative Europe without danger to Britain. The moment

soon passed. The League of Nations, which had been regarded by the Group as the seed

whence a united Europe might grow, became nothing more than a propaganda machine,

as soon as the Group resumed its belief in the balance of power. Curtis, who in December

1918 wrote in The Round Table: "That the balance of power has outlived its time by a

century and that the world has remained a prey to wars, was due to the unnatural

alienation of the British and American Commonwealths"—Curtis, who wrote this in

1918, four years later (9 January 1923) vigorously defended the idea of balance of power

against the criticism of Professor A. F. Pollard at a meeting of the RIIA.

This change in point of view was based on several factors. In the first place, the

Group, by their practical experience at Paris in 1919, found that it was not possible to

apply either self-determination or the parliamentary form of government to Europe. As a

result of this experience, they listened with more respect to the Cecil Bloc, which always

insisted that these, especially the latter, were intimately associated with the British

outlook, way of life, and social traditions, and were not articles of export. This issue was

always the chief bone of contention between the Group and the Bloc in regard to India. In

India, where their own influence as pedagogues was important, the Group did not accept

the Bloc's arguments completely, but in Europe, where the Group's influence was remote

and indirect, the Group was more receptive.

In the second place, the Croup at Paris became alienated from the French because of

the latter's insistence on force as the chief basis of social and political life, especially the

French insistence on a permanent mobilization of force to keep Germany down and on an

international police force with autonomous power as a part of the League of Nations. The

Group, although they frequently quoted Admiral Mahan's kind words about force in

social life, did not really like force and shrank from its use, believing, as might be

expected from their Christian background, that force could not avail against moral issues,

that force corrupts those who use it, and that the real basis of social and political life w as

custom and tradition. At Paris the Group found that they were living in a different world

from the French. They suddenly saw not only that they did not have the same outlook as

their former allies, but that these allies embraced the “despotic" and "militaristic" outlook

against which the late war had been waged. At once, the Group began to think that the

influence which they had been mobilizing against Prussian despotism since 1907 could

best be mobilized, now that Prussianism was dead, against French militarism and

Bolshevism. And what better ally against these two enemies in the West and the East

shall the newly baptized Germany? Thus, almost without realizing it, the Group fell back

into the old balance-of-power pattern. Their aim became the double one of keeping

Germany in the fold of redeemed sinners by concessions, and of using this revived and

purified Germany against Russia and France.(3)

In the third place, the Group in 1918 had been willing to toy with the idea of an

integrated Europe because, in 1918, they believed that a permanent system of cooperation

between Britain and the United States was a possible outcome of the war. This was the

lifelong dream of Rhodes, of Milner, of Lothian, of Curtis. For that they would have

sacrificed anything within reason. When it became clear in 1920 that the United States

had no intention of underwriting Britain and instead would revert to her prewar

isolationism, the bitterness of disappointment in the Milner Group were beyond bounds.

Forever after, they blamed the evils of Europe, the double-dealing of British policy, and

the whole train of errors from 1919 to 1940 on the American reversion to isolationism. It

should be clearly understood that by American reversion to isolationism the Milner

Croup did not mean the American rejection of the League of Nations. Frequently they

said that they did mean this, that the disaster of 1939-1940 became inevitable when the

Senate rejected the League of Nations in 1920. This is completely untrue, both as a

statement of historical fact and as a statement of the Group's attitude toward that rejection

at the time. As we shall see in a moment, the Group approved of the Senate's rejection of

the League of Nations, because the reasons for that rejection agreed completely with the

Group's own opinion about the League. The only change in the Group's opinion, as a

result of the Senate's rejection of the League, occurred in respect to the Group's opinion

regarding the League itself. Previously they had disliked the League; now they hated it—

except as a propaganda agency. The proofs of these statements will appear in a moment.

The change in the Group's attitude toward Germany began even before the war ended.

We have indicated how the Group rallied to give a public testimonial of faith in Lord

Milner in October 1918, when he became the target of public criticism because of what

was regarded by the public as a conciliatory speech toward Germany. The Group

objected violently to the anti-German tone in which Lloyd George conducted his electoral

campaign in the "khaki election' of December 1918. The Round Table in March 1919

spoke of Lloyd George and "the odious character of his election campaign." Zimmern,

after a devastating criticism of Lloyd George's conduct in the election, wrote: "He erred,

not, like the English people, out of ignorance but deliberately, out of cowardice and lack

of faith." In the preface to the same volume ( Europe in Convalescence) he wrote: "Since

December, 1918, when we elected a Parliament pledged to violate a solemn agreement

made but five weeks earlier, we stand shamed, dishonoured, and, above all, distrusted

before mankind." The agreement to which Zimmern referred was the so-called Pre-

Armistice Agreement of 5 November 1918, made with the Germans, by which, if they

accepted an armistice, the Allies agreed to make peace on the basis of the Fourteen

Points. It was the thesis of the Milner Group that the election of 1918 and the Treaty of

Versailles as finally signed violated this Pre-Armistice Agreement. As a result, the Group

at once embarked on its campaign for revision of the treaty, a campaign whose first aim,

apparently, was to create a guilty conscience in regard to the treaty in Britain and the

United States. Zimmern's book, Brand's book of the previous year, and all the articles of

The Round Table were but ammunition in this campaign. However, Zimmern had no

illusions about the Germans, and his attack on the treaty was based solely on the need to

redeem British honor. As soon as it became clear to him that the Group was going

beyond this motive and was trying to give concessions to the Germans without any

attempt to purge Germany of its vicious elements and without any guarantee that those

concessions would not be used against everything the Group held dear, he left the inner

circle of the Group and moved to the second circle. He was not convinced that Germany

could be redeemed by concessions made blindly to Germany as a whole, or that Germany

should be built up against France and Russia. He made his position clear in a brilliant and

courageous speech at Oxford in May 1925, a speech in which he denounced the steady

sabotage of the League of Nations. It is not an accident that the most intelligent member

of the Group was the first member to break publicly with the policy of appeasement.

The Milner Group thus regarded the Treaty of Versailles as too severe, as purely

temporary, and as subject to revision almost at once. When The Round Table examined

the treaty in its issue of June 1919, it said, in substance: "The punishment of Germany

was just, for no one can believe in any sudden change of heart in that country, but the

treaty is too severe. The spirit of the Pre-Armistice Commitments was violated, and, in

detail after detail, Germany was treated unjustly, although there is broad justice in the

settlement as a whole. Specifically the reparations are too severe, and Germany's

neighbors should have been forced to disarm also, as promised in Wilson's Fourth Point.

No demand should have been made for William II as a war criminal. If he is a menace, he

should be put on an island without trial, like Napoleon. Our policy must be

magnanimous, for our war was with the German government, not with the German

people." Even earlier, in December 1918, The Round Table said: "It would seem

desirable that the treaties should not be long term, still less perpetual, instruments.

Perpetual treaties are indeed a lien upon national sovereignty and a standing contradiction

of the principle of the democratic control of foreign policy. . . . It would establish a

salutary precedent if the network of treaties signed as a result of the war were valid for a

period of ten years only." In March 1920, The Round Table said: "Like the Peace

Conference, the Covenant of the League of Nations aimed too high and too far. Six

months ago w e looked to it to furnish the means for peaceful revision of the terms of the

peace, where revision might be required. Now we have to realize that national sentiment

sets closer limits to international action than we were willing then to recognize." The

same article then goes on to speak of the rejection of the treaty by the United States

Senate. It defends this action and criticizes Wilson severely, saying: "The truth of the

matter is that the American Senate has expressed the real sentiment of all nations with

hard-headed truthfulness.... The Senate has put into words what has already been

demonstrated in Europe by the logic of events—namely that the Peace of Versailles

attempted too much, and the Covenant which guarantees it implies a capacity for united

action between the Allies which the facts do not warrant. The whole Treaty was, in fact,

framed to meet the same impractical desire which we have already noted in the reparation

terms—the desire to mete out ideal justice and to build an ideal world."

Nowhere is the whole point of view of the Milner Group better stated than in a speech

of General Smuts to the South African Luncheon Club in London, 23 October 1923.

After violent criticism of the reparations as too large and an attack on the French efforts

to enforce these clauses, he called for a meeting "of principals" to settle the problem. He

then pointed out that a continuation of existing methods would lead to the danger of

German disintegration, "a first-class and irreparable disaster.... It would mean immediate

economic chaos, and it would open up the possibility of future political dangers to which

I need not here refer. Germany is both economically and politically necessary to Central

Europe." He advocated applying to Germany "the benevolent policy which this country

adopted toward France after the Napoleonic War.... And if, as I hope she will do,

Germany makes a last appeal . . . I trust this great Empire will not hesitate for a moment

to respond to that appeal and to use all its diplomatic power and influence to support her,

and to prevent a calamity which would be infinitely more dangerous to Europe and the

world than was the downfall of Russia six or seven years ago." Having thus lined Britain

up in diplomatic opposition to France, Smuts continued with advice against applying

generosity to the latter country on the question of French war debts, warning that this

would only encourage "French militarism."

“Do not let us from mistaken motives of generosity lend our aid to the further

militarization of the European continent. People here are already beginning to be

seriously alarmed about French armaments on land and in the air. In addition to these

armaments, the French government have also lent large sums to the smaller European

States around Germany, mainly with a view to feeding their ravenous military appetites.

There is a serious danger lest a policy of excessive generosity on our part, or on the part

of America, may simply have the effect of enabling France still more effectively to

subsidize and foster militarism on the Continent.... If things continue on the present lines,

this country may soon have to start rearming herself in sheer self-defence.”

This speech of Smuts covers so adequately the point of view of the Milner Group in

the early period of appeasement that no further quotations are necessary. No real change

occurred in the point of view of the Group from 1920 to 1938, not even as a result of the

death of democratic hopes in Germany at the hands of the Nazis. From Smuts's speech of

October 1923 before the South African Luncheon Club to Smuts's speech of November

1934 before the RIIA, much water flowed in the river of international affairs, but the

ideas of the Milner Group remained rigid and, it may be added, erroneous. Just as the

speech of 1923 may be taken as the culmination of the revisionist sentiment of the Group

in the first five years of peace, so the speech of 1934 may be taken as the initiation of the

appeasement sentiment of the Group in the last five years of peace. The speeches could

almost be interchanged. We may call one revisionist and the other appeasing, but the

point of view, the purpose, the method is the same. These speeches will be mentioned

again later.

The aim of the Milner Group through the period from 1920 to 1938 was the same: to

maintain the balance of power in Europe by building up Germany against France and

Russia; to increase Britain's weight in that balance by aligning with her the Dominions

and the United States; to refuse any commitments (especially any commitments through

the League of Nations, and above all any commitments to aid France) beyond those

existing in 1919; to keep British freedom of action; to drive Germany eastward against

Russia if either or both of these two powers became a threat to the peace of Western

Europe.

The sabotage of the peace settlement by the Milner Group can be seen best in respect

to reparations and the League of Nations. In regard to the former, their argument

appeared on two fronts: in the first place, the reparations were too large because they

were a dishonorable violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement; and, in the second place,

any demand for immediate or heavy payments in reparation would ruin Germany's

international credit and her domestic economic system, to the jeopardy of all reparation

payments immediately and of all social order in Central Europe in the long run.

The argument against reparations as a violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement can

be found in the volumes of Zimmern and Brand already mentioned. Both concentrated

their objections on the inclusion of pension payments by the victors to their own soldiers

in the total reparation bill given to the Germans. This was, of course, an obvious violation

of the Pre-Armistice Agreement, which bound the Germans to pay only for damage to

civilian property. Strangely enough, it was a member of the Group, Jan Smuts, who was

responsible for the inclusion of the objectionable items, although he put them in not as a

member of the Group, but as a South African politician. This fact alone should have

prevented him from making his speech of October 1923. However, love of consistency

has never prevented Smuts from making a speech.

From 1921 onward, the Milner Group and the British government (if the two policies

are distinguishable) did all they could to lighten the reparations burden on Germany and

to prevent France from using force to collect reparations. The influence of the Milner

Group on the government in this field may perhaps be indicated by the identity of the two

policies. It might also be pointed out that a member of the Group, Arthur (now Sir

Arthur) Salter, was general secretary of the Reparations Commission from 1920 to 1922.

Brand was financial adviser to the chairman of the Supreme Economic Council (Lord

Robert Cecil) in 1919; he was vice-president of the Brussels Conference of 1920; and he

was the financial representative of South Africa at the Genoa Conference of 1922 (named

by Smuts). He was also a member of the International Committee of Experts on the

Stabilization of the German Mark in 1922. Hankey was British secretary at the Genoa

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

secretary of the Hague Conference of 1929-1930 (which worked out the detailed

application of the Young Plan) and of the Lausanne Conference (which ended

reparations).

On the two great plans to settle the reparations problem, the Dawes Plan of 1924 and

the Young Plan of 1929, the chief influence was that of J. P. Morgan and Company, but

the Milner Group had half of the British delegation on the former committee. The British

members of the Dawes Committee were two in number: Sir Robert Molesworth (now

Lord) Kindersley, and Sir Josiah (later Lord) Stamp. The former was chairman of the

board of directors of Lazard Brothers and Company. Of this firm, Brand was a partner

and managing director for many years. The instigation for the formation of this

committee came chiefly from the parliamentary agitations of H. A. L. Fisher and John

Simon in the early months of 1923.

The Milner Group was outraged at the efforts of France to compel Germany to pay

reparations. Indeed, they were outraged at the whole policy of France: reparations, the

French alliances in Eastern Europe, the disarmament of Germany, French "militarism,"

the French desire for an alliance with Britain, and the French desire for a long-term

occupation of the Rhineland. These six things were listed in The Round Table of March

1922 as "the Poincaré system." The journal then continued: "The Poincaré system,

indeed, is hopeless. It leads inevitably to fresh war, for it is incredible that a powerful and

spirited people like the Germans will be content to remain forever meekly obeying every

flourish of Marshal Foch’s sword." Earlier, the reader was informed: "The system is

impracticable. lt assumes that the interests of Poland and the Little Entente are the same

as those of France.... It forgets that the peoples of Europe cannot balance their budgets

and recover prosperity unless they cut down their expenditures on armaments to a

minimum.... It ignores the certainty that British opinion can no more tolerate a French

military hegemony over Europe than it could a German or Napoleonic, with its menace to

freedom and democracy everywhere."

When the French, in January 1923, occupied the Ruhr in an effort to force Germany to

pay reparations, the rage of the Milner Group almost broke its bounds. In private, and in

the anonymity of The Round Table, they threatened economic and diplomatic retaliation,

although in public speeches, such as in Parliament, they were more cautious. However,

even in public Fisher, Simon, and Smuts permitted their real feelings to become visible.

In the March 1923 issue The Round Table suggested that the reparations crisis and the

Ruhr stalemate could be met by the appointment of a committee of experts (including

Americans) to report on Germany's capacity to pay reparations. It announced that H. A.

L. Fisher would move an amendment to the address to this effect in Parliament. This

amendment was moved by Fisher on 19 February 1923, before The Round Table in

question appeared, in the following terms:

“That this House do humbly represent to your Majesty that, inasmuch as the future

peace of Europe cannot be safeguarded nor the recovery of reparations be promoted by

the operations of the French and Belgian Governments in the Ruhr, it is urgently

necessary to seek effective securities against aggression by international guarantees under

the League of Nations, and to invite the Council of the League without delay to appoint a

Commission of Experts to report upon the capacity of Germany to pay reparations and

upon the best method of effecting such payments, and that, in view of the recent

indication of willingness on the part of the Government of the United States of America

to participate in a Conference to this end, the British representatives on the Council of the

League should be instructed to urge that an invitation be extended to the American

government to appoint experts to serve upon the Commission.”

This motion had, of course, no chance whatever of passing, and Fisher had no

expectation that it would. It was merely a propaganda device. Two statements in it are

noteworthy. One was the emphasis on American participation, which was to be expected

from the Milner Group. But more important than this was the thinly veiled threat to

France contained in the words "it is urgently necessary to seek effective securities against

aggression by international guarantees." This clause referred to French aggression and

was the seed from which emerged, three years later, the Locarno Pacts. There were also

some significant phrases, or slips of the tongue, in the speech which Fisher made in

support of his motion. For example, he used the word "we" in a way that apparently

referred to the Milner Group; and he spoke of "liquidation of the penal clauses of the

Treaty of Versailles" as if that were the purpose of the committee he was seeking. He

said: "We are anxious to get the amount of the reparation payment settled by an impartial

tribunal. We propose that it should be remitted to the League of Nations.... But I admit

that I have always had a considerable hesitation in asking the League of Nations to

undertake the liquidation of the penal clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.... It is an

integral part of this Amendment that the Americans should be brought in." Lord Robert

Cecil objected to the amendment on the ground that its passage would constitute a

censure of the government and force it to resign. John Simon then spoke in support of the

motion. He said that France would never agree to any reparations figure, because she did

not want the reparations clauses fulfilled, since that would make necessary the evacuation

of the Rhineland. France went into the Rul1r, he said, not to collect reparations, but to

cripple Germany; France was spending immense sums of money on military occupation

and armaments but still was failing to pay either the principal or interest on her debt to

Britain.

When put to a vote, the motion was defeated, 305 to 196. In the majority were

Ormsby-Gore, Edward Wood, Amery, three Cecils (Robert, Evelyn, and Hugh), two

Astors (John and Nancy), Samuel Hoare, Eustace Percy, and Lord Wolmer. In the

minority were Fisher, Simon, and Arthur Salter.

By March, Fisher and Simon were more threatening to France. On the sixth of that

month, Fisher said in the House of Commons: "I can only suggest this, that the

Government make it clear to France, Germany, and the whole world that they regard this

present issue between France and Germany, not as an issue affecting two nations, but as

an issue affecting the peace and prosperity of the whole world. We should keep before

ourselves steadily the idea of an international solution. We should work for it with all our

power, and we should make it clear to France that an attempt to effect a separate solution

of this question could not be considered otherwise than as an unfriendly act." Exactly a

week later, John Simon, in a parliamentary maneuver, made a motion to cut the

appropriation bill for the Foreign Office by £100 and seized the opportunity to make a

violent attack on the actions of France. He was answered by Eustace Percy, who in turn

was answered by Fisher.

In this way the Group tried to keep the issue before the minds of the British public and

to prepare the way for the Dawes settlement. The Round Table, appealing to a somewhat

different public, kept up a similar barrage. In the June 1923 issue, and again in

September, it condemned the occupation of the Ruhr. In the former it suggested a three-

part program as follows: (1) find out what Germany can pay, by an expert committee's

investigation; (2) leave Germany free to work and produce, by an immediate evacuation

of the Rhineland; and (3) protect France and Germany from each other [another hint

about the future Locarno Pacts]. This program, according to The Round Table, should be

imposed on France with the threat that if France did not accept it, Britain would withdraw

from the Rhineland and Reparations Commissions and formally terminate the Entente. It

concluded: " The Round Table has not hesitated in recent months to suggest that [British]

neutrality . . . was an attitude inconsistent either with the honour or the interests of the

British Commonwealth." The Round Table even went so far as to say that the inflation in

Germany was caused by the burden of reparations. In the September 1923 issue it said

(probably by the pen of Brand): "In the last two years it is not inflation which has brought

down the mark; the printing presses have been engaged in a vain attempt to follow the

depreciation of the currency. That depreciation has been a direct consequence of the

world's judgment that the Allied claims for reparation were incapable of being met. It will

continue until that judgment, or in other words, those claims are revised."

In October 1923, Smuts, who was in London for the Imperial Conference and was in

close contact with the Group, made speeches in which he compared the French

occupation of the Ruhr with the German attack on Belgium in 1914 and said that Britain

"may soon have to start rearming herself in sheer self-defence" against French militarism.

John Dove, writing to Brand in a private letter, found an additional argument against

France in the fact that her policy was injuring democracy in Germany. He wrote:

“It seems to me that the most disastrous effect 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

ourselves baffled.... I doubt if we shall again have as good a chance of getting a peaceful

democracy set up in Germany.”

After the Dawes Plan went into force, the Milner Group's policies continued to be

followed by the British government. The "policy of fulfillment" pursued by Germany

under Stresemann was close to the heart of the Group. In fact, there is a certain amount of

evidence that the Group was in a position to reach Stresemann and advise him to follow

this policy. This was done through Smuts and Lord D'Abernon. There is little doubt that

the Locarno Pacts were designed in the Milner Group and were first brought into public

notice by Stresemann, at the suggestion of Lord D'Abernon.

Immediately after Smuts made his speech against France in October 1923, he got in

touch with Stresemann, presumably in connection with the South African Mandate in

South-West Africa. Smuts himself told the story to Mrs. Millen, his authorized

biographer, in these words:

“I was in touch with them [the Germans] in London over questions concerning

German South-West. They had sent a man over from their Foreign Office to see me. (4) I

can't say the Germans have behaved very well about German South-West, but that is

another matter. Well, naturally, my speech meant something to this fellow. The English

were hating the Ruhr business; it was turning them from France to Germany, the whole

English-speaking world was hating it. Curzon, in particular, was hating it. Yet very little

was being done to express all this feeling. I took it upon myself to express the feeling. I

acted, you understand, unofficially. I consulted no one. But I could see my action would

not be abhorrent to the Government—would, in fact, be a relief to them. When the

German from the Foreign Office came to me full of what this sort of attitude would mean

to Stresemann I told him I was speaking only for myself. "But you can see," I said, ‘that

the people here approve of my speech. If my personal advice is any use to you, I would

recommend the Germans to give up their policy of non-cooperation, to rely on the

goodwill of the world and make a sincere advance towards the better understanding

which I am sure can be brought about.’ I got in touch with Stresemann. Our

correspondence followed those lines. You will remember that Stresemann's policy ended

in the Dawes Plan and the Pact of Locarno and that he got the Nobel Peace for this

work!"

In this connection it is worthy of note that the German Chancellor, at a Cabinet

meeting on 12 November 1923, quoted Smuts by name as the author of what he

(Stresemann) considered the proper road out of the crisis.

Lord D'Abernon was not a member of the Milner Group. He was, however, a member

of the Cecil Bloc's second generation and had been, at one time, a rather casual member

of "The Souls." This, it will be recalled, was the country-house set in which George

Curzon, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton, St. John Brodrick, and the Tennant sisters were

the chief figures. Born Edgar Vincent, he was made Baron D'Abernon in 1914 by

Asquith who was also a member of "The Souls" and married Margot Tennant in 1894.

D'Abernon joined the Coldstream Guards in 1877 after graduating from Eton, but within

a few years was helping Lord Salisbury to unravel the aftereffects of the Congress of

Berlin. By 1880 he was private secretary to Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, brother of Lord

Lansdowne and Commissioner for European Turkey. The following year he was assistant

to the British Commissioner for Evacuation of the Territory ceded to Greece by Turkey.

In 1882 he was the British, Belgian, and Dutch representative on the Council of the

Ottoman Public Debt, and soon became president of that Council. From 1883 to 1889 he

was financial adviser to the Egyptian government and from 1889 to 1897 was governor of

the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Constantinople. In Salisbury's third administration he was

a Conservative M.P. for Exeter (1899-1906). The next few years were devoted to private

affairs in international banking circles close to Milner. In 1920 he was the British civilian

member of the "Weygand mission to Warsaw." This mission undoubtedly had an

important influence on his thinking. As a chief figure in Salisbury's efforts to bolster up

the Ottoman Empire against Russia, D'Abernon had always been anti-Russian. In this

respect, his background was like Curzon's. As a result of the Warsaw mission,

D'Abernon's anti-Russian feeling was modified to an anti-Bolshevik one of much greater

intensity. To him the obvious solution seemed to be to build up Germany as a military

bulwark against the Soviet Union. He said as much in a letter of 11 August 1920 to Sir

Maurice Hankey. This letter, printed by D'Abernon in his book on the Battle of Warsaw

( The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, published 1931), suggests that "a good

bargain might be made with the German military leaders in cooperating against the

Soviet." Shortly afterwards, D'Abernon was made British Ambassador at Berlin. At the

time, it was widely rumored and never denied that he had been appointed primarily to

obtain some settlement of the reparations problem, it being felt that his wide experience

in international public finance would qualify him for this work. This may have been so,

but his prejudices likewise qualified him for only one solution to the problem, the one

desired by the Germans.(5)

In reaching this solution, D'Abernon acted as the intermediary among Stresemann, the

German Chancellor; Curzon, the Foreign Secretary; and, apparently, Kindersley, Brand’s

associate at Lazard Brothers. According to Harold Nicolson in his book Curzon The Last

Phase (1934), "The initial credit for what proved the ultimate solution belongs, in all

probability, to Lord D'Abernon—one of the most acute and broad-minded diplomatists

which this country has ever possessed." In the events leading up to Curzon's famous note

to France of 11 August 1923, the note which contended that the Ruhr occupation could

not be justified under the Treaty of Versailles, D'Abernon played an important role both

in London and in Berlin. In his Diary of an Ambassador, D'Abernon merely listed the

notes between Curzon and France and added: "Throughout this controversy Lord

D'Abernon had been consulted.”

During his term as Ambassador in Berlin, D'Abernon's policy was identical with that

of the Milner Group, except for the shading that he was more anti-Soviet and less anti-

French and was more impetuous in his desire to tear up the Treaty of Versailles in favor

of Germany. This last distinction rested on the fact that D'Abernon was ready to appease

Germany regardless of whether it were democratic or not; indeed, he did not regard

democracy as either necessary or good for Germany. The Milner Group, until 1929, was

still in favor of a democratic Germany, because they realized better than D'Abernon the

danger to civilization from an undemocratic Germany. It took the world depression and

its resulting social unrest to bring the Milner Group around to the view which D'Abernon

held as early as 1920, that appeasement to an undemocratic Germany could be used as a

weapon against "social disorder. "

Brigadier General J. H. Morgan, whom we have already quoted, makes perfectly clear

that D'Abernon was one of the chief obstacles in the path of the Inter-allied Commission's

efforts to force Germany to disarm. In 1920, when von Seeckt, Commander of the

German Army, sought modifications of the disarmament rules which would have

permitted large-scale evasion of their provisions, General Morgan found it impossible to

get his dissenting reports accepted in London. He wrote in Assize of Arms: "At the

eleventh hour I managed to get my reports on the implications of von Seeckt's plan

brought to the direct notice of Mr. Lloyd George through the agency of my friend Philip

Kerr who, after reading these reports, advised the Prime Minister to reject von Seeckt's

proposals. Rejected they were at the Conference of Spa in July 1920, as we shall see, but

von Seeckt refused to accept defeat and fell back on a second move." When, in 1921,

General Morgan became "gravely disturbed" at the evasions of German disarmament, he

wrote a memorandum on the subject. It was suppressed by Lord D'Abernon. Morgan

added in his book: "I was not altogether surprised. Lord D'Abernon was the apostle of

appeasement." In January 1923, this "apostle of appeasement" forced the British

delegation on the Disarmament Commission to stop all inspection operations in

Germany. They were never resumed, although the Commission remained in Germany for

four more years, and the French could do nothing without the British members.(6)

Throughout 1923 and 1924, D'Abernon put pressure on both the German and the

British governments to pursue a policy on the reparations question which was identical

with that which Smuts was advocating at the same time and in the same quarters. He put

pressure on the British government to follow this policy on the grounds that any different

policy would lead to Stresemann's fall from office. This would result in a very dangerous

situation, according to D'Abernon (and Stresemann), where Germany might fall into the

control of either the extreme left or the extreme right. For example, a minute of a German

Cabinet meeting of 2 November 1923, found by Eric Sutton among Stresemann's papers

and published by him, said in part: "To the English Ambassador, who made some rather

anxious enquiries, Stresemann stated that the maintenance of the state of siege was

absolutely essential in view of the risk of a Putsch both from the Left and from the Right.

He would use all his efforts to preserve the unity of the Reich.... Lord D'Abernon replied

that his view, which was shared in influential quarters in London, was that Stresemann

was the only man who could steer the German ship of State through the present troubled

waters." Among the quarters in London which shared this view, we find the Milner

Group.

The settlement which emerged from the crisis, the Dawes Plan and the evacuation of

the Ruhr, was exactly what the Milner Group wanted. From that point on to the banking

crisis of 1931, their satisfaction continued. In the years 1929-1931 they clearly had no

direct influence on affairs, chiefly because a Labour government was in office in London,

but their earlier activities had so predetermined the situation that it continued to develop

in the direction they wished. After the banking crisis of 1931, the whole structure of

international finance with which the Group had been so closely associated disappeared

and, after a brief period of doubt, was replaced by a rapid growth of monopolistic

national capitalism. This was accepted by the Milner Group with hardly a break in stride.

Hichens had been deeply involved in monopolistic heavy industry for a quarter of a

century in 1932. Milner had advocated a system of "national capitalism" with "industrial

self-regulation" behind tariff walls even earlier. Amery and others had accepted much of

this as a method, although they did not necessarily embrace Milner's rather socialistic

goals. As a result, in the period 1931-1933, the Milner Group willingly liquidated

reparations, war debts, and the whole structure of international capitalism, and embraced

protection and cartels instead.

Parallel with their destruction of reparations, and in a much more direct fashion, the

Milner Group destroyed collective security through the League of Nations. The Group

never intended that the League of Nations should be used to achieve collective security.

They never intended that sanctions, either military or economic, should be used to force

any aggressive power to keep the peace or to enforce any political decision which might

be reached by international agreement. This must be understood at the beginning. The

Milner Group never intended that the League should be used as an instrument of

collective security or that sanctions should be used as an instrument by the League.

From the beginning, they expected only two things from the League: (1) that it could

be used as a center for international cooperation in international administration in

nonpolitical matters, and (2) that it could be used as a center for consultation in

political matters. In regard to the first point, the Group regarded the League as a center

for such activities as those previously exercised through the International Postal Union.

In all such activities as this, each state would retain full sovereignty and would cooperate

only on a completely voluntary basis in fields of social importance. In regard to the

second point (political questions), no member of the Group had any intention of any state

yielding any sliver of its full sovereignty to the League. The League was merely an

agreement, like any treaty, by which each state bound itself to confer together in a crisis

and not make war within three months of the submission of the question to consultation.

The whole purpose of the League was to delay action in a crisis by requiring this period

for consultation. There was no restriction on action after the three months. There was

some doubt, within the Group, as to whether sanctions could be used to compel a state to

observe the three months' delay. Most of the members of the Group said "no" to this

question. A few said that economic sanctions could be used. Robert Cecil, at the

beginning, at least, felt that political sanctions might be used to compel a state to keep the

peace for the three months, but by 1922 every member of the Group had abandoned both

political and economic sanctions for enforcing the three months' delay. There never was

within the Group any intention at any time to use sanctions for any other purpose, such as

keeping peace after the three-month period.

This, then, was the point of view of the Milner Group in 1919, as in 1939.

Unfortunately, in the process of drawing up the Covenant of the League in 1919, certain

phrases or implications were introduced into the document, under pressure from France,

from Woodrow Wilson, and from other groups in Britain, which could be taken to

indicate that the League might have been intended to be used as a real instrument of

collective security, that it might have involved some minute limitation of state

sovereignty, that sanctions might under certain circumstances be used to protect the

peace. As soon as these implications became clear, the Group's ardor for the League

began to evaporate. when the United States refused to join the League, this dwindling

ardor turned to hatred. Nevertheless, the Group did not abandon the League at this point.

On the contrary, they tightened their grip on it—in order to prevent any "foolish" persons

from using the vague implications of the Covenant in an effort to make the League an

instrument of collective security. The Group were determined that if any such effort as

this were made, they would prevent it and, if necessary, destroy the League to prevent it.

Only they would insist, in such a case, that the League was destroyed not by them but by

the persons who tried to use it as an instrument of collective security.

All of this may sound extreme. Unfortunately, it is not extreme. That this was what the

Group did to the League is established beyond doubt in history. That the Group intended

to do this is equally beyond dispute. The evidence is conclusive.

The British ideas on the League and the British drafts of the Covenant were formed by

four men, all close to the Milner Group. They were Lord Robert Cecil, General Smuts,

Lord Phillimore, and Alfred Zimmern. For drafting documents they frequently used Cecil

Hurst, a close associate, but not a member, of the Group. Hurst (Sir Cecil since 1920) was

assistant legal adviser to the Foreign Office in 1902-1918, legal adviser in 1918-1929, a

judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague in 1929-1946, and

Chairman of the United Nations War Crimes Commission in 1943-1944. He was the man

responsible for the verbal form of Articles 10-16 (the sanction articles) of the Covenant

of the League of Nations, for the Articles of Agreement with Ireland in 1921, and for the

wording of the Locarno Pact in 1925. He frequently worked closely with the Milner

Group. For example, in 1921 he was instrumental in making an agreement by which the

British Yearbook of International Law, of which he was editor, was affiliated with the

Royal Institute of International Affairs. At the time, he and Curtis were working together

on the Irish agreement.

As early as 1916, Lord Robert Cecil was trying to persuade the Cabinet to support a

League of Nations. This resulted in the appointment of the Phillimore Committee, which

drew up the first British draft for the Covenant. As a result, in 1918-1919 Lord Robert

became the chief government spokesman for a League of Nations and the presumed

author of the second British draft. The real author of this second draft was Alfred

Zimmern. Cecil and Zimmern were both dubious of any organization that would restrict

state sovereignty. On 12 November 1918, the day after the armistice, Lord Robert made a

speech at Birmingham on the type of League he expected. That speech shows clearly that

he had little faith in the possibility of disarmament and none in international justice or

military sanctions to preserve the peace. The sovereignty of each state was left intact. As

W. E. Rappard (director of the Graduate School of International Studies at Geneva) wrote

in International Conciliation in June 1927, "He [Lord Cecil] was very sceptical about the

possibility of submitting vital international questions to the judgment of courts of law end

'confessed to the gravest doubts' as to the practicability of enforcing the decrees of such

courts by any 'form of international force.' On the other hand, he firmly believed in the

efficacy of economic pressure as a means of coercing a country bent on aggression in

violation of its pacific agreements." It might be remarked in passing that the belief that

economic sanctions could be used without a backing of military force, or the possibility

of needing such backing, is the one sure sign of a novice in foreign politics, and Robert

Cecil could never be called a novice in such matters. In the speech itself he said:

“The most important step we can now take is to devise machinery which, in case of

international dispute, will, at the least, delay the outbreak of war, and secure full and

open discussion of the causes of the quarrel. For that purpose . . . all that would be

necessary would be a treaty binding the signatories never to wage war themselves or

permit others to wage war till a formal conference of nations had been held to enquire

into, and, if possible, decide the dispute. It is probably true, at least in theory, that

decisions would be difficult to obtain, for the decisions of such a conference, like all

other international proceedings, would have to be unanimous to be binding. But since the

important thing is to secure delay and open discussion, that is to say, time to enable

public opinion to act and information to instruct it, this is not a serious objection to the

proposal. Indeed, from one point of view, it is an advantage, since it avoids any

interference with national sovereignty except the interposition of a delay in seeking

redress by force of arms. This is the essential thing.... To that extent, and to that extent

only, international coercion would be necessary.”

This speech of Cecil's was approved by The Round Table and accepted as its own

point of view in the issue of December 1918. At the same time, through Smuts, the

Milner Group published another statement of its views. This pamphlet, called The League

of Nations, a Practical Suggestion, was released in December 1918, after having been

read in manuscript and criticized by the inner circle, especially Curtis. This statement

devoted most of its effort to the use of mandates for captured German colonies. For

preserving the peace, it had considerable faith in compulsory arbitration and hoped to

combine this with widespread disarmament.

The Group's own statement on this subject appeared in the December 1918 issue of

The Round Table in an article called "Windows of Freedom," written by Curtis. He

pointed out that British sea-power had twice saved civilization and any proposal that it

should be used in the future only at the request of the League of Nations must be

emphatically rejected. The League would consist of fallible human beings, and England

could never yield her decision to them. He continued: “Her own existence and that of the

world’s freedom are inseparably connected. . . . To yield it without a blow is to yield the

whole citadel in which the forces that make for human freedom are entrenched; to

covenant to yield it is to bargain a betrayal of the world in advance.... [The League must

not be a world government.] If the burden of a world government is placed on it it will

fall with a crash." He pointed out it could be a world government only if it represented

peoples and not states, and if it had the power to tax those peoples. It should simply be an

interstate conference of the world.

“The Peace Conference . . . cannot hope to produce a written constitution for the globe

or a genuine government of mankind. What it can do is establish a permanent annual

conference between foreign ministers themselves, with a permanent secretariat, in which,

as at the Peace Conference itself, all questions at issue between States can be discussed

and, if possible, settled by agreement. Such a conference cannot itself govern the world,

still less those portions of mankind who cannot yet govern themselves. But it can act as a

symbol and organ of the human conscience, however imperfect, to which real

governments of existing states can be made answerable for facts which concern the world

at large."

In another article in the same issue of The Round Table ("Some Principles and

Problems of the Settlement," December 1918), similar ideas were expressed even more

explicitly by Zimmern. He stated that the League of Nations should be called the League

of States, or the Interstate Conference, for sovereign states would be its units, and it

would make not laws but contracts. "The League of Nations, in fact, is far from

invalidating or diminishing national sovereignty, should strengthen and increase it.... The

work before the coming age is n to supersede the existing States but to moralize them....

Membership must be restricted to those states where authority is based upon the consent

of the people over whom it is exercised ... the reign of law.... It can reasonably be

demanded that no States should be admitted which do not make such a consummation

one of the deliberate aims of their policy." Under this idea, The Round Table excluded by

name from the new League, Liberia, Mexico, "and above all Russia." "The League," it

continued, "will not simply be a League of States, it will be a League of

Commonwealths." As its hopes in the League dwindled, The Round Table became less

exclusive, and, in June 1919, it declared, "without Germany or Russia the League of

Nations will be dangerously incomplete. "

In the March 1919 issue, The Round Table described in detail the kind of League it

wanted—"a common clearing house for noncontentious business." Its whole basis was to

be "public opinion," and its organization was to be that of "an assembly point of

bureaucrats of various countries" about an international secretariat and various

organizations like the International Postal Union or the International Institute of

Agriculture.

“Every great department of government in each country whose activities touch those

of similar departments in other countries should have its recognized delegates on a

permanent international commission charged with the study of the sphere of international

relations in question and with the duty of making recommendations to their various

Governments. . . . Across the street, as it were, from these permanent Bureaux, at the

capital of the League, there should be another central permanent Bureau ... an

International secretariat.... They must not be national ambassadors, but civil servants

under the sole direction of a non-national chancellor; and the aim of the whole

organization . . . must be to evolve a practical international sense, a sense of common

service.”

This plan regarded the Council of the League as the successor of the Supreme War

Council, made up of premiers and foreign ministers, and the instrument for dealing with

political questions in a purely consultative way. Accordingly, the Council would consist

only of the Great Powers.

These plans for the Covenant of the League of Nations were rudely shattered at the

Peace Conference when the French demanded that the new organization be a "Super-

state" with its own army and powers of action. The British were horrified, but with the

help of the Americans were able to shelve this suggestion. However, to satisfy the

demand from their own delegations as well as the French, they spread a camouflage of

sham world government over the structure they had planned. This was done by Cecil

Hurst. Hurst visited David Hunter Miller, the American legal expert, one night and

persuaded him to replace the vital clauses 10 to 16 with drafts drawn up by Hurst. These

drafts were deliberately drawn with loopholes so that no aggressor need ever be driven to

the point where sanctions would have to be applied. This was done by presenting

alternative paths of action leading toward sanctions, some of them leading to economic

sanctions, but one path, which could be freely chosen by the aggressor, always available,

leading to a loophole where no collective action would be possible. The whole procedure

was concealed beneath a veil of legalistic terminology so that the Covenant could be

presented to the public as a watertight document, but Britain could always escape from

the necessity to apply sanctions through a loophole.

In spite of this, the Milner Group were very dissatisfied. They tried simultaneously to

do three things: (1) to persuade public opinion that the League was a wonderful

instrument of international cooperation designed to keep the peace; (2) to criticize the

Covenant for the "traces of a sham world-government" which had been thrown over it;

and (3) to reassure themselves and the ruling groups in England, the Dominions, and the

United States that the League was not "a world-state." All of this took a good deal of neat

footwork, or, more accurately, nimble tongues and neat pen work. More double-talk and

double-writing were emitted by the Milner Group on this subject in the two decades

1919-1939 than was issued by any other group on this subject in the period.

Among themselves the Group did not conceal their disappointment with the Covenant

because it went too far. In the June 1919 issue of The Round Table they said reassuringly:

"The document is not the Constitution of a Super-state, but, as its title explains, a solemn

agreement between Sovereign States which consent to limit their complete freedom of

action on certain points.... The League must continue to depend on the free consent, in the

last resort, of its component States; this assumption is evident in nearly every article of

the Covenant, of which the ultimate and most effective sanction must be the public

opinion of the civilized world. If the nations of the future are in the main selfish,

grasping, and bellicose, no instrument or machinery will restrain them." But in the same

issue we read the complaint: "In the Imperial Conference Sir Wilfrid Laurier was never

tired of saying, 'This is not a Government, but a conference of Governments with

Governments.' It is a pity that there was no one in Paris to keep on saying this. For the

Covenant is still marked by the traces of sham government. "

By the March 1920 issue, the full bitterness of the Group on this last point became

evident. It said: "The League has failed to secure the adhesion of one of its most

important members, The United States, and is very unlikely to secure it.... This situation

presents a very serious problem for the British Empire. We have not only undertaken

great obligations under the League which we must now both in honesty and in self-regard

revise, but we have looked to the League to provide us with the machinery for United

British action in foreign affairs. " (my italics; this is the cat coming out of the bag). The

article continued with criticism of Wilson, and praise of the Republican Senate's refusal

to swallow the League as it stood. It then said:

“The vital weakness of the Treaty and the Covenant became more clear than ever in

the months succeeding the signature at Versailles. A settlement based on ideal principles

and poetic justice can be permanently applied and maintained only by a world

government to which all nations will subordinate their private interests.... It demands, not

only that they should sacrifice their private interests to this world-interest, but also that

they should be prepared to enforce the claims of world-interest even in matters where

their own interests are in no wise engaged. It demands, in fact, that they should

subordinate their national sovereignty to an international code and an international ideal.

The reservations of the American Senate...point the practical difficulties of this ideal with

simple force. All the reservations . . . are affirmations of the sovereign right of the

American people to make their own policy without interference from an International

League.... None of these reservations, it should be noted, contravenes the general aims of

the League; but they are, one and all, directed to ensure that no action is taken in pursuit

of those aims except with the consent and approval of the Congress.... There is nothing

peculiar in this attitude. It is merely, we repeat, the broad reflex of an attitude already

taken up by all the European Allies in questions where their national interests are

affected, and also by the British Dominions in their relations with the British

Government. It gives us a statement in plain English, of the limitations to the ideal of

international action which none of the other Allies will, in practice, dispute. So far,

therefore, from destroying the League of Nations, the American reservations have

rendered it the great service of pointing clearly to the flaws which at present neutralize its

worth.”

Among these flaws, in the opinion of the Milner Croup, was the fact that their plan to

use the League of Nations as a method of tying the Dominions more closely to the United

Kingdom had failed and, instead, the Covenant

“gave the Dominions the grounds, or rather the excuse, to avoid closer union with the

United Kingdom.... It had been found in Paris that in order to preserve its unity the

British delegation must meet frequently as a delegation to discuss its policy before

meeting the representatives of foreign nations in conference. How was this unity of action

to be maintained after the signature of peace without committing the Dominion

Governments to some new constitutional organization within the Commonwealth? And if

some new constitutional organization were to be devised for this purpose, how could it

fail to limit in some way the full national independent status which the Dominion

Governments had just achieved by their recognition as individual members of the League

of Nations? The answer to these questions was found in cooperation within the League,

which was to serve, not only as the link between the British Empire and foreign Powers,

but as the link also between the constituent nations of the British Empire itself. Imbued

with this idea, the Dominion statesmen accepted obligations to foreign Powers under the

Covenant of the League more binding than any obligations which they would undertake

to their kindred nations within the British Empire. In other words, they mortgaged their

freedom of action to a league of foreign States in order to avoid the possibility of

mortgaging it to the British Government. It hardly required the reservations of the

American Senate to demonstrate the illusory character of this arrangement.... The British

Dominions have made no such reservations with regard to the Covenant, and they are

therefore bound by the obligations which have been rejected by the United States.

Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand are, in fact, bound by stronger written

obligations to Poland and Czechoslovakia, than to the British Isles.... It is almost needless

to observe that none of the democracies of the British Empire has grasped the extent of its

obligations to the League of Nations or would hesitate to repudiate them at once, if put to

the test. If England were threatened by invasion, the other British democracies would

mobilize at once for her support; but though they have a written obligation to Poland,

which they have never dreamed of giving to England, they would not in practice mobilize

a single man to defend the integrity of the Corridor to Danzig or any other Polish

territorial interest.... This is a dangerous and equivocal situation.... It is time that our

democracies reviewed and corrected it with the clearness of vision and candour of

statement displayed by the much-abused Senate of the United States.... To what course of

action do these conclusions point? They point in the first place to revision of our

obligations under the League. We are at present pledged to guarantees of territorial

arrangements in Europe which may be challenged at any time by forces too powerful for

diplomatic control, and it is becoming evident that in no part of the Empire would public

opinion sanction our active interference in the local disputes which may ensue. The

Polish Corridor to Danzig is a case in point.... Our proper course is to revise and restate

our position towards the League in accordance with these facts.... First, we wish to do our

utmost to guarantee peace, liberty, and 18w throughout the world without committing

ourselves to quixotic obligations to foreign States. Second, we wish to assist and develop

the simple mechanism of international dealing embodied in the League without

mortgaging our freedom of action and judgment under an international Covenant. Our

policy toward the League should, therefore, be revised on the following guiding lines: 1.

We should state definitely that our action within the League will be governed solely by

our own judgment of every situation as it arises, and we must undertake no general

obligations which we may not be able or willing, when the test comes, to discharge. 2.

We must in no case commit ourselves to responsibilities which we cannot discharge to

the full with our own resources, independent of assistance from any foreign power. 3. We

must definitely renounce the idea that the League may normally enforce its opinions by

military or economic pressure on the recalcitrant States. It exists to bring principals

together for open discussion of international difficulties, to extend and develop the

mechanisms and habit of international cooperation, and to establish an atmosphere in

which international controversies may be settled with fairness and goodwill.... With the

less ambitious objects defined above it will sooner or later secure the whole-hearted

support of American opinion.... The influence of the League of Nations upon British

Imperial relations has for the moment been misleading and dangerous.... It is only a

question of time before this situation leads to an incident of some kind which will

provoke the bitterest recrimination and controversy. . .”

In the leading article of the September 1920 issue, The Round Table took up the same

problem and repeated many of its arguments. It blamed Wilson for corrupting the

Covenant into "a pseudo world-government" by adding sham decorations to a

fundamentally different structure based on consultation of sovereign states. Instead of the

Covenant, it concluded, we should have merely continued the Supreme Council, which

was working so well at Spa.

In spite of this complete disillusionment with the League, the Milner Group still

continued to keep a firm grip on as much of it as Britain could control. In the first

hundred sessions of the Council of the League of Nations (1920-1938), thirty different

persons sat as delegates for Britain. Omitting the four who sat for Labour governments,

we have twenty-six. Of these, seven were from the Milner Group; seven others were

present at only one session and are of little significance. The others were almost all from

the Cecil Bloc close to the Milner Group. The following list indicates the distribution.

Name Sessions as Delegate

Anthony Eden 39

Sir John Simon 22

Sir Austen Chamberlain 20

Arthur Balfour 16

Lord Robert Cecil 15

Six Alexander Cadogan 12

E. H. Carr 8

H. A. L. Fisher 7

Sir William Malkin 7

Viscount Cranborne 5

Lord Curzon 3

Lord Londonderry 3

Leopold Amery 2

Edward Wood (Lord Halifax) 2

Cecil Hurst 2

Sir Edward H. Young 2

Lord Cushendun 2

Lord Onslow 2

Gilbert Murray 1

Sir Rennell Rodd 1

Six others 1 each

At the annual meetings of the Assembly of the League, a somewhat similar situation

existed. The delegations had from three to eight members, with about half of the number

being from the Milner Group, except when members of the Labour Party were present. H.

A. L. Fisher was a delegate in 1920, 1921, and 1922; Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton was one in

1923, 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1931; Lord Astor was one in 1931, 1936, and 1938; Cecil

Hurst was one in 1924, 1926, 1927, and 1928; Gilbert Murray was one in 1924; Lord

Halifax was one in 1923 and 1936; Ormsby-Gore was one in 1933; Lord Robert Cecil

was one in 1923, 1926, 1929, 1930, 1931, and 1932; E. H. Carr was one in 1933 and

1934, etc. The Milner Group control was most complete at the crucial Twelfth Assembly

(1931), when the delegation of five members consisted of Lord Robert Cecil, Lord

Lytton, Lord Astor, Arthur Salter, and Mrs. Lyttelton. In addition, the Group frequently

had other members attached to the delegations as secretaries or substitutes. Among these

were E. H. Carr, A. L. Smith, and R. M. Makins. Moreover, the Group frequently had