Chapter 7: The Round Table
The second important propaganda effort of the Milner Group in the period after 1909 was The Round Table. This was part of an effort by the circle of the Milner Group to accomplish for the whole Empire what they had just done for South Africa. The leaders were Philip Kerr in London, as secretary of the London group, and Lionel Curtis throughout the world, as organizing secretary for the whole movement, but most of the members of the Kindergarten cooperated in the project. The plan of procedure was the same as that which had worked so successfully in South Africa — that is, to form local groups of influential men to agitate for imperial federation and to keep in touch with these groups by correspondence and by the circulation of a periodical. As in South Africa, the original cost of the periodical was paid by Abe Bailey. This journal, issued quarterly, was called The Round Table, and the same name was applied to the local groups.
Of these local groups, the most important by far was the one in London. In this, Kerr and Brand were the chief figures. The other local groups, also called Round Tables, were set up by Lionel Curtis and others in South Africa, in Canada, in New Zealand, in Australia, and, in a rather rudimentary fashion and somewhat later, in India.
The reasons for doing this were described by Curtis himself in 1917 in A Letter to the People of India, as follows: "We feared that South Africa might abstain from a future war with Germany, on the grounds that they had not participated in the decision to make war.... Confronted by this dilemma at the very moment of attaining Dominion self- government, we thought it would be wise to ask people in the oldest and most experienced of all Dominions what they thought of the matter. So in 1909, Mr. Kerr and I went to Canada and persuaded Mr. Marris, who was then on leave, to accompany us." (1)
On this trip the three young men covered a good portion of the Dominion. One day, during a walk through the forests on the Pacific slopes of the Canadian Rockies, Marris convinced Curtis that "self-government, . . . however far distant, was the only intelligible goal of British policy in India.... The existence of political unrest in India, far from being a reason for pessimism, was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest failings, had not shirked their primary duty of extending Western education to India and so preparing Indians to govern themselves." "I have since looked back on this walk," wrote Curtis, "as one of the milestones of my own education. So far I had thought of self- government as a Western institution, which was and would always remain peculiar to the peoples of Europe.... It was from that moment that I first began to think of 'the Government of each by each and of all by all' not merely as a principle of Western life, but rather of all human life, as the goal to which all human societies must tend. It was from that moment that I began to think of the British Commonwealth as the greatest instrument ever devised for enabling that principle to be realized, not merely for the children of Europe, but for all races and kindreds and peoples and tongues. And it is for that reason that I have ceased to speak of the British Empire and called the book in which I published my views The Commonwealth of Nations."
Because of Curtis's position and future influence, this walk in Canada was important not only in his personal life but also in the future history of the British Empire. It needs only to be pointed out that India received complete self-government in 1947 and the British Commonwealth changed its name officially to Commonwealth of Nations in 1948. There can be no doubt that both of these events resulted in no small degree from the influence of Lionel Curtis and the Milner Group, in which he was a major figure.
Curtis and his friends stayed in Canada for four months. Then Curtis returned to South Africa for the closing session of the Transvaal Legislative Council, of which he was a member. He there drafted a memorandum on the whole question of imperial relations, and, on the day that the Union of South Africa came into existence, he sailed to New Zealand to set up study groups to examine the question. These groups became the Round Table Groups of New Zealand. (2)
The memorandum was printed with blank sheets for written comments opposite the text. Each student was to note his criticisms on these blank pages. Then they were to meet in their study groups to discuss these comments, in the hope of being able to draw up joint reports, or at least majority and minority reports, on their conclusions. These reports were to be sent to Curtis, who was to compile a comprehensive report on the whole imperial problem. This comprehensive report would then be submitted to the groups in the same fashion and the resulting comments used as a basis for a final report.
Five study groups of this type were set up in New Zealand, and then five more in Australia. (3) The decision was made to do the same thing in Canada and in England, and this was done by Curtis, Kerr, and apparently Dove during 1910. On the trip to Canada, the missionaries carried with them a letter from Milner to his old friend Arthur J. Glazebrook, with whom he had remained in close contact throughout the years since Glazebrook went to Canada for an English bank in 1893. The Round Table in 1941, writing of Glazebrook, said, "His great political hero was his friend Lord Milner, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence." As a result of this letter from Milner, Glazebrook undertook the task of founding Round Table Groups in Canada and did this so well that he was for twenty years or more the real head of the network of Milner Group units in the Dominion. He regularly wrote the Canadian articles in The Round Table magazine. When he died, in 1940, The Round Table obituary spoke of him as "one of the most devoted and loyal friends that The Round Table has ever known. Indeed he could fairly claim to be one of its founding fathers." In the 1930s he relinquished his central position in the Canadian branch of the Milner Group to Vincent Massey, son-in- law of George Parkin. Glazebrook's admiration for Parkin was so great that he named his son George Parkin de Twenebrokes Glazebrook. (4) At the present time Vincent Massey and G. P. de T. Glazebrook are apparently the heads of the Milner Group organization in Canada, having inherited the position from the latter's father. Both are graduates of Balliol, Massey in 1913 and Glazebrook in 1924. Massey, a member of a very wealthy Canadian family, was lecturer in modern history at Toronto University in 1913-1915, and then served, during the war effort, as a staff officer in Canada, as associate secretary of the Canadian Cabinet's War Committee, and as secretary and director of the Government Repatriation Committee. Later he was Minister without Portfolio in the Canadian Cabinet (1924), a member of the Canadian delegation to the Imperial Conference of 1926, and first Canadian Minister to the United States (1926-1930). He was president of the National Liberal Federation of Canada in 1932-1935, Canadian High Commissioner in London in 1935-1946, and Canadian delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1936. He has been for a long time governor of the University of Toronto and of Upper Canada College (Parkin's old school). He remains to this day one of the strongest supporters of Oxford University and of a policy of close Canadian cooperation with the United Kingdom.
G. P. de T. Glazebrook, son of Milner's old friend Arthur J. Glazebrook and namesake of Milner's closest collaborator in the Rhodes Trust, was born in 1900 and studied at Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and Balliol. Since 1924 he has been teaching history at Toronto University, but since 1942 has been on leave to the Dominion government, engaged in strategic intelligence work with the Department of External Affairs. Since 1948 he has been on loan from the Department of External Affairs to the Department of Defense, where he is acting as head of the new Joint Services Intelligence. This highly secret agency appears to be the Canadian equivalent to the American Central Intelligence Agency. Glazebrook has written a number of historical works, including a History of Transportation in Canada (1938), Canadian External Affairs, a Historical Study to 1914 (1942), and Canada at the Peace Conference (1942).
It was, as we have said, George Parkin Glazebrook's father who, acting in cooperation with Curtis, Kerr, and Marris and on instructions from Milner, set up the Round Table organization in Canada in 1911. About a dozen units were established in various cities.
It was during the effort to extend the Round Table organization to Australia that Curtis first met Lord Chelmsford. He was later Viceroy of India (in 1916-1921), and there can be little doubt that the Milner Group was influential in this appointment, for Curtis discussed the plans which eventually became the Government of India Act of 1919 with him before he went to India and consulted with him in India on the same subject in 1916. (5)
From 1911 to 1913, Curtis remained in England, devoting himself to the reports coming in from the Round Table Groups on imperial organization, while Kerr devoted himself to the publication of The Round Table itself. This was an extraordinary magazine. The first issue appeared with the date 15 November 1910. It had no names in the whole issue, either of the officers or of the contributors of the five articles. The opening statement of policy was unsigned, and the only address to which communications could be sent was "The Secretary, 175 Piccadilly, London, W." This anonymity has been maintained ever since, and has been defended by the journal itself in advertisements, on the grounds that anonymity gives the contributors greater independence and freedom. The real reasons, however, were much more practical than this and included the fact that the writers were virtually unknown and were so few in numbers, at first at least, as to make the project appear ridiculous had the articles been signed. For example, Philip Kerr, during his editorship, always wrote the leading article in every issue. In later years the anonymity was necessary because of the political prominence of some of the contributors. In general, the policy of the journal has been such that it has continued to conceal the identity of its writers until their deaths. Even then, they have never been connected with any specific article, except in the case of one article (the first one in the first issue) by Lord Lothian. This article was reprinted in The Round Table after the author's death in 1940.
The Round Table was essentially the propaganda vehicle of a handful of people and could not have carried signed articles either originally, when they were too few, or later, when they were too famous. It was never intended to be either a popular magazine or self-supporting, but rather was aimed at influencing those in a position to influence public opinion. As Curtis wrote in 1920, "A large quarterly like The Round Table is not intended so much for the average reader, as for those who write for the average reader. It is meant to be a storehouse of information of all kinds upon which publicists can draw. Its articles must be taken on their merits and as representing nothing beyond the minds and information of the individual writer of each." (6)
It is perhaps worth mentioning that the first article of the first issue, called "Anglo- German Rivalry," was very anti-German and forms an interesting bit of evidence when taken in connection with Curtis's statement that the problem of the Empire was raised in 1909 by the problem of what role South Africa would play in a future war with Germany. The Group, in the period before 1914, were clearly anti-German. This must be emphasized because of the mistaken idea which circulated after 1930 that the Cliveden group, especially men like Lord Lothian, were pro-German. They were neither anti- German in 1910 nor pro-German in 1938, but pro-Empire all the time, changing there their attitudes on other problems as these problems affected the Empire. And it should be realized that their love for the Empire was not mere jingoism or flag-waving (things at which Kerr mocked within the Group) (7) but was based on the sincere belief that freedom, civilization, and human decency could best be advanced through the instrumentality of the British Empire.
In view of the specific and practical purpose of The Round Table — to federate the Empire in order to ensure that the Dominions would join with the United Kingdom in a future war with Germany — the paper could not help being a propagandist organ, propagandist on a high level, it is true, but nonetheless a journal of opinion rather than a journal of information. Every general article in the paper (excluding the reports from representatives in the Dominions) was really an editorial — an unsigned editorial speaking for the group as a whole. By the 1920s these articles were declaring, in true editorial style, that "The Round Table does not approve of" something or other, or, "It seems to The Round Table that" something else.
Later the members of the Group denied that the Group were concerned with the propagation of any single point of view. Instead, they insisted that the purpose of the Group was to bring together persons of various points of view for purposes of self- education. This is not quite accurate. The Group did not contain persons of various points of view but rather persons of unusual unanimity of opinion, especially in regard to goals. There was a somewhat greater divergence in regard to methods, and the circulating of memoranda within the Group to evoke various comments was for the purpose of reaching some agreement on methods only — the goals being already given. In this, meetings of the Group were rather like the meetings of the British Cabinet, although any normal Cabinet would contain a greater variety of opinion than did the usual meetings of the Group. In general, an expression of opinion by any one member of the Group sounded like an echo of any of the others. Their systems of values were identical; the position of the British Commonwealth at the apex of that system was almost axiomatic; the important role played by moral and ideological influences in the Commonwealth and in the value system was accepted by all; the necessity of strengthening the bonds of the Commonwealth in view of the approaching crisis of the civilization of the West was accepted by all, so also was the need for closer union with the United States. There was considerable divergence of opinion regarding the practicality of imperial federation in the immediate future; there was some divergence of ideas regarding the rate at which self-government should be extended to the various parts of the Empire (especially India). There was a slight difference of emphasis on the importance of relations between the Commonwealth and the United States. But none of these differences of opinion was fundamental or important. The most basic divergence within the Group during the first twenty years or so was to be found in the field of economic ideas — a field in which the Group as a whole was extremely weak, and also extremely conservative. This divergence existed, however, solely because of the extremely unorthodox character of Lord Milner's ideas. Milner's ideas (as expressed, for example, in his book Questions of the Hour, published in 1923) would have been progressive, even unorthodox, in 1935. They were naturally ahead of the times in 1923, and they were certainly far ahead of the ideas of the Group as a whole, for its economic ideas would have been old-fashioned in 1905. These ideas of the Group (until 1931, at least) were those of late-nineteenth-century international banking and financial capitalism. The key to all economics and prosperity was considered to rest in banking and finance. With "sound money," a balanced budget, and the international gold standard, it was expected that prosperity and rising standards of living would follow automatically. These ideas were propagated through The Round Table, in the period after 1912, in a series of articles written by Brand and subsequently republished under his name, with the title War and National Finance (1921). They are directly antithetical to the ideas of Milner as revealed in his book published two years later. Milner insisted that financial questions must be subordinated to economic questions and economic questions to political questions. As a result, if a deflationary policy, initiated for financial reasons, has deleterious economic or political effects, it must be abandoned. Milner regarded the financial policy advocated by Brand in 1919 and followed by the British government for the next twelve years as a disaster, since it led to unemployment, depression, and ruination of the export trade, instead, Milner wanted to isolate the British economy from the world economy by tariffs and other barriers and encourage the economic development of the United Kingdom by a system of government spending, self-regulated capital and labor, social welfare, etc. This program, which was based on "monopoly capitalism" or even "national socialism" rather than "financial capitalism," as Brand's was, was embraced by most of the Milner Group after September 1931, when the ending of the gold standard in Britain proved once and for all that Brand's financial program of 1919 was a complete disaster and quite unworkable. As a result, in the years after 1931 the businessmen of the Milner Group embarked on a policy of government encouragement of self-regulated monopoly capitalism. This was relatively easy for many members of the Group because of the distrust of economic individualism which they had inherited from Toynbee and Milner. In April 1932, when P. Horsfall, manager of Lazard Brothers Bank (a colleague of Brand), asked John Dove to write a defense of individualism in The Round Table, Dove suggested that he write it himself, but, in reporting the incident to Brand, he clearly indicated that the Group regarded individualism as obsolete. (8)
This difference of opinion between Milner and Brand on economic questions is not of great importance. The important matter is that Brand's opinion prevailed within the Group from 1919 to 1931, while Milner's has grown in importance from 1931 to the present. The importance of this can be seen in the fact that the financial and economic policy followed by the British government from 1919 to 1945 runs exactly parallel to the policy of the Milner Group. This is no accident but is the result, as we shall see, of the dominant position held by the Milner Group in the councils of the Conservative-Unionist party since the First World War.
During the first decade or so of its existence, The Round Table continued to be edited and written by the inner circle of the Milner Group, chiefly by Lothian, Brand, Hichens, Grigg, Dawson, Fisher, and Dove. Curtis was too busy with the other activities of the Group to devote much time to the magazine and had little to do with it until after the war. By that time a number of others had been added to the Group, chiefly as writers of occasional articles. Most of these were members or future members of All Souls; they include Coupland, Zimmern, Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Salter, Sir Maurice Hankey, and others. The same Group that originally started the project in 1910 still controls it today, with the normal changes caused by death or old age. The vacancies resulting from these causes have been filled by new recruits from All Souls. It would appear that Coupland and Brand are the most influential figures today. The following list gives the editors of The Round Table from 1910 to the recent past:
Philip Kerr, 1910-1917 (assisted by E. Grigg, 1913-1915)
Reginald Coupland, 1917-1919
Lionel Curtis, 1919-1921
John Dove, 1921-1934
Henry V. Hodson, 1934-1939
Vincent Todd Harlow, (acting editor) 1938
Reginald Coupland, 1939-1941
Geoffrey Dawson, 1941-1944
Of these names, all but two are already familiar. H. V. Hodson, a recent recruit to the Milner Group, was taken from All Souls. Born in 1906, he was at Balliol for three years (1925-1928) and on graduation obtained a fellowship to All Souls, which he held for the regular term (1928-1935). This fellowship opened to him the opportunities which he had the ability to exploit. On the staff of the Economic Advisory Council from 1930 to 1931 and an important member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, he was assistant editor of The Round Table for three years (1931-1934) and became editor when Dove died in 1934. At the same time he wrote for Toynbee the economic sections of the Survey of International Affairs from 1929 on, publishing these in a modified form as a separate volume, with the title Slump and Recovery, 1929-1937, in 1938. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he left The Round Table editorship and went to the Ministry of Information (which was controlled completely by the Milner Group) as director of the Empire Division. After two years in this post he was given the more critical position of Reforms Commissioner in the Government of India for two years (1941-1942) and then was made assistant secretary and later head of the non-munitions division of the Ministry of Production. This position was held until the war ended, three years later. He then returned to private life as assistant editor of The Sunday Times. In addition to the writings already mentioned, he published The Economics of a Changing World (1933) and The Empire in the World (1937), and edited The British Commonwealth and the Future (1939).
Vincent T. Harlow, born in 1898, was in the Royal Field Artillery in 1917-1919 and then went to Brasenose, where he took his degree in 1923. He was lecturer in Modern History at University College, Southampton, in 1923-1927, and then came into the magic circle of the Milner Group. He was keeper of Rhodes House Library in 1928-1938, Beit Lecturer in Imperial History in 1930-1935, and has been Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at the University of London since 1938. He was a member of the Imperial Committee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and, during the war, was head of the Empire Information Service at the Ministry of Information. He lives near Oxford, apparently in order to keep in contact with the Group.
In the decade 1910-1920, the inner circle of the Milner Group was busy with two other important activities in addition to The Round Table magazine. These were studies of the problem of imperial federation and of the problem of extending self-government to India. Both of these were in charge of Lionel Curtis and continued with little interruption from the war itself. The Round Table, which was in charge of Kerr, never interrupted its publication, but from 1915 onward it became a secondary issue to winning the war and making the peace. The problem of imperial federation will be discussed here and in Chapter 8, the war and the peace in Chapter 7, and the problem of India in Chapter 10.
During the period 1911-1913, as we have said, Curtis was busy in England with the reports from the Round Table Groups in the Dominions in reply to his printed memorandum. At the end of 1911 and again in 1913, he printed these reports in two substantial volumes, without the names of the contributors. These volumes were never published, but a thousand copies of each were distributed to the various groups. On the basis of these reports, Curtis drafted a joint report, which was printed and circulated as each section was completed. It soon became clear that there was no real agreement within the groups and that imperial federation was not popular in the Dominions. This was a bitter pill to the Group, especially to Curtis, but he continued to work for several years more. In 1912, Milner and Kerr went to Canada and made speeches to Round Table Groups and their associates. The following year Curtis went to Canada to discuss the status of the inquiry on imperial organization with the various Round Table Groups there and summed up the results in a speech in Toronto in October 1913.(9) He decided to draw up four reports as follows: (a) the existing situation; (b) a system involving complete independence for the Dominions; (c) a plan to secure unity of foreign relations by each Dominion's following a policy independent from but parallel to that of Britain itself; (d) a plan to reduce the United Kingdom to a Dominion and create a new imperial government over all the Dominions. Since the last was what Curtis wanted, he decided to write that report himself and allow supporters of each of the other three to write theirs. A thousand copies of this speech were circulated among the groups throughout the world.
When the war broke out in 1914, the reports were not finished, so it was decided to print the four sections already sent out, with a concluding chapter. A thousand copies of this, with the title Project of a Commonwealth, were distributed among the groups. Then a popular volume on the subject, with the title The Problem of the Commonwealth and Curtis's name as editor, was published (May 1916). Two months later, the earlier work (Project) was published under the title The Commonwealth of Nations, again with Curtis named as editor. Thus appeared for the first time in public the name which the British Empire was to assume thirty-two years later. In the September 1916 issue of The Round Table, Kerr published a statement on the relationship of the two published volumes to the Round Table Groups. Because of the paper shortage in England, Curtis in 1916 went to Canada and Australia to arrange for the separate publication of The Problem of the Commonwealth in those countries. At the same time he set up new Round Table Groups in Australia and New Zealand. Then he went to India to begin serious work on Indian reform. From this emerged the Government of India Act of 1919, as we shall see later.
By this time Curtis and the others had come to realize that any formal federation of the Empire was impossible. As Curtis wrote in 1917 (in his Letter to the People of India): "The people of the Dominions rightly aspire to control their own foreign affairs and yet retain their status as British citizens. On the other hand, they detest the idea of paying taxes to any Imperial Parliament, even to one upon which their own representatives sit. The inquiry convinced me that, unless they sent members and paid taxes to an Imperial Parliament, they could not control their foreign affairs and also remain British subjects. But I do not think that doctrine is more distasteful to them than the idea of having anything to do with the Government of India."
Reluctantly Curtis and the others postponed the idea of a federated Empire and fell back on the idea of trying to hold the Empire together by the intangible bonds of common culture and common outlook. This had originally (in Rhodes and Milner) been a supplement to the project of a federation. It now became the chief issue, and the idea of federation fell into a secondary place. At the same time, the idea of federation was swallowed up in a larger scheme for organizing the whole world within a League of Nations. This idea had also been held by Rhodes and Milner, but in quite a different form. To the older men, the world was to be united around the British Empire as a nucleus. To Curtis, the Empire was to be absorbed into a world organization. This second idea was fundamentally mystical. Curtis believed: "Die and ye shall be born again." He sincerely felt that if the British Empire died in the proper way (by spreading liberty, brotherhood, and justice), it would be born again in a higher level of existence — as a world community, or, as he called it, a "Commonwealth of Nations." It is not yet clear whether the resurrection envisaged by Curtis and his associates will occur, or whether they merely assisted at the crucifixion of the British Empire. The conduct of the new India in the next few decades will decide this question.