Re: The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Clivede
Posted: Tue Apr 30, 2019 12:28 am
Chapter 8: War and Peace, 1915-1920
The Milner Group was out of power for a decade from 1906 to 1915. We have already indicated our grounds for believing that this condition was not regarded with distaste, since its members were engaged in important activities of their own and approved of the conduct of foreign policy (their chief field of interest) by the Liberal Party under Asquith, Grey, and Haldane. During this period came the Union of South Africa, The Morley- Minto reforms, the naval race with Germany, the military conversations with France, the agreement of 1907 with Russia, the British attitude against Germany in the Agadir crisis (a crisis to whose creation The Times had contributed no little material) — in fact, a whole series of events in which the point of view of the Milner Group was carried out just as if they were in office. To be sure, in domestic matters such as the budget dispute and the ensuing House of Lords dispute, and in the question of Home Rule for Ireland, the Milner Group did not regard the Liberal achievements with complete satisfaction, but in none of these were the members of the Milner Group diehards (as members of the Cecil Bloc sometimes were). (1) But with the outbreak of war, the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc wanted to come to power and wanted it badly, chiefly because control of the government in wartime would make it possible to direct events toward the postwar settlement which the Group envisaged. The Group also believed that the war could be used by them to fasten on Britain the illiberal economic regulation of which they had been dreaming since Chamberlain resigned in 1903 (at least).
The Group got to power in 1916 by a method which they repeated with the Labour Party in 1931. By a secret intrigue with a parvenu leader of the government, the Group offered to make him head of a new government if he would split his own party and become Prime Minister, supported by the Group and whatever members he could split off from his own party. The chief difference between 1916 and 1931 is that in the former year the minority that was being betrayed was the Group's own social class — in fact, the Liberal Party members of the Cecil Bloc. Another difference is that in 1916 the plot worked — the Liberal Party was split and permanently destroyed — while in 1931 the plotters broke off only a fragment of the Labour Party and damaged it only temporarily (for fourteen years). This last difference, however, was not caused by any lack of skill in carrying out the intrigue but by the sociological differences between the Liberal Party and the Labour Party in the twentieth century. The latter was riding the wave of the future, while the former was merely one of two "teams" put on the field by the same school for an intramural game, and, as such, it was bound to fuse with its temporary antagonist as soon as the future produced an extramural challenger. This strange (to an outsider) point of view will explain why Asquith had no real animosity for Bonar Law or Balfour (who really betrayed him) but devoted the rest of his life to belittling the actions of Lloyd George. Asquith talked later about how he was deceived (and even lied to) in December 1915, but never made any personal attack on Bonar Law, who did the prevaricating (if any). The actions of Bonar Law were acceptable in the code of British politics, a code largely constructed on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow, but Lloyd George's actions, which were considerably less deliberate and cold-blooded, were quite unforgivable, coming as they did from a parvenu who had been built up to a high place in the Liberal Party because of his undeniable personal ability, but who, nonetheless, was an outsider who had never been near the playing fields of Eton.
In the coalition governments of May 1915 and December 1916, members of the Cecil Bloc took the more obvious positions (as befitted their seniority), while members of the Milner Group took the less conspicuous places, but by 1918 the latter group had the whole situation tied up in a neat package and held all the strings.
In the first coalition (May 1915), Lansdowne came into the Cabinet without portfolio, Curzon as Lord Privy Seal, Bonar Law at the Colonial Office, Austen Chamberlain at the India Office, Balfour at the Admiralty, Selborne as President of the Board of Agriculture, Walter Long as President of the Local Government Board, Sir Edward Carson as Attorney General, F. E. Smith as Solicitor General, Lord Robert Cecil as Under Secretary in the Foreign Office, and Arthur Steel-Maitland as Under Secretary in the Colonial Office. Of these eleven names, at least nine were members of the Cecil Bloc, and four were close to the Milner Group (Cecil, Balfour, Steel-Maitland, and Selborne).
In the second coalition government (December 1916), Milner was Minister without Portfolio; Curzon was Lord President of the Council; Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Robert Finlay, Lord Chancellor; the Earl of Crawford, Lord Privy Seal; Sir George Cave, Home Secretary; Arthur Balfour, Foreign Secretary; The Earl of Derby, War Secretary; Walter Long, Colonial Secretary; Austen Chamberlain, at the India Office; Sir Edward Carson, First Lord of the Admiralty; Henry E. Duke, Chief Secretary for Ireland; H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education; R. E. Prothero, President of the Board of Agriculture; Sir Albert Stanley, President of the Board of Trade; F. E. Smith, Attorney General; Robert Cecil, Minister of Blockade; Lord Hardinge, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs; Steel-Maitland, Under Secretary for the Colonies; and Lord Wolmer (son of Lord Selborne), assistant director of the War Trade Department. Of these twenty names, eleven, at least, were members of the Cecil Bloc, and four or five were members of the Milner Group.
Milner himself became the second most important figure in the government (after Lloyd George), especially while he was Minister without Portfolio. He was chiefly interested in food policy, war trade regulations, and postwar settlements. He was chairman of a committee to increase home production of food (1915) and of a committee on postwar reconstruction (1916). From the former came the food- growing policy adopted in 1917, and from the latter came the Ministry of Health set up in 1919. In 1917 he went with Lloyd George to a meeting of the Allied War Council in Rome and from there on a mission to Russia. He went to France after the German victories in March 1918, and was the principal influence in the appointment of Foch as Supreme Commander in the west. In April he became Secretary of State for War, and, after the election of December 1918, became Colonial Secretary. He was one of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles. Of Milner's role at this time, John Buchan wrote in his memoirs: "In the Great War from 1916 to 1918, he was the executant of the War Cabinet who separated the sense from the nonsense in the deliberations of that body, and was responsible for its chief practical achievements. To him were largely due the fruitful things which emerged from the struggle, the new status of the Dominions, and the notable advances in British social policy." In all of these actions Milner remained as unobtrusive as possible. Throughout this period Milner's opinion of Lloyd George was on the highest level. Writing twenty years later in The Commonwealth of God, Lionel Curtis recorded two occasions in which Milner praised Lloyd George in the highest terms. On one of these he called him a greater war leader than Chatham.
At this period it was not always possible to distinguish between the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group, but it is notable that the members of the former who were later clearly members of the latter were generally in the fields in which Milner was most interested. In general, Milner and his Group dominated Lloyd George during the period from 1917 to 1921. As Prime Minister, Lloyd George had three members of the Group as his secretaries (P. H. Kerr, 1916-1922; W. G. S. Adams, 1916-1919; E. W. M. Grigg, 1921- 1922) and Waldorf Astor as his parliamentary secretary (1917-1918). The chief decisions were made by the War Cabinet and Imperial War Cabinet, whose membership merged and fluctuated but in 1917-1918 consisted of Lloyd George, Milner, Curzon, and Smuts — that is, two members of the Milner Group, one of the Cecil Bloc, with the Prime Minister himself. The secretary to these groups was Maurice Hankey (later a member of the Milner Group), and the editor of the published reports of the War Cabinet was W. G. S. Adams. Amery was assistant secretary, while Meston was a member of the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917. Frederick Liddell (Fellow of All Souls) was made First Parliamentary Counsel in 1917 and held the position for eleven years, following this post with a fifteen-year period of service as counsel to the Speaker (1928-1943). (2)
Within the various government departments a somewhat similar situation prevailed. The Foreign Office in its topmost ranks was held by the Cecil Bloc, with Balfour as Secretary of State (1916-1919), followed by Curzon (1919-1924). When Balfour went to the United States on a mission in 1917, he took along Ian Malcolm (brother-in-law of Dougal Malcolm). Malcolm was later Balfour's private secretary at the Peace Conference in 1919. In Washington, Balfour had as deputy chairman to the mission R. H. Brand. In London, as we have seen, Robert Cecil was Parliamentary Under Secretary and later Assistant Secretary. In the Political Intelligence Department, Alfred Zimmern was the chief figure. G. W. Prothero was director of the Historical Section and was, like Cecil and Zimmern, chiefly concerned with the future peace settlement. He was succeeded by J. W. Headlam-Morley, who held the post of historical adviser from 1920 to his death in 1928. All of these persons were members of the Cecil Bloc or Milner Group.
In the India Office we need mention only a few names, as this subject will receive a closer scrutiny later. Austen Chamberlain was Secretary of State in 1915-1917 and gave the original impetus toward the famous act of 1919. Sir Frederick Duke (a member of the Round Table Group, whom we shall mention later) was chief adviser to Chamberlain's successor, E. S. Montagu, and became Permanent Under Secretary in 1920. Sir Malcolm Seton (also a member of the Round Table Group from 1913 onward) was Assistant Under Secretary (1919-1924) and later Deputy Under Secretary.
In blockade and shipping, Robert Cecil was Minister of Blockade (1916-1918), while Reginald Sothern Holland organized the attack on German trade in the earlier period (1914). M. L. Gwyer was legal adviser to the Ministry of Shipping during the war and to the Ministry of Health after the war (1917-1926), while J. Arthur Salter (later a contributor to The Round Table and a Fellow of All Souls for almost twenty years) was director of ship requisitioning in 1917 and later secretary to the Allied Maritime Transport Council and chairman of the Allied Maritime Transport Executive (1918). After the war he was a member of the Supreme Economic Council and general secretary to the Reparations Commission (1919-1922).
A. H. D. R. Steel-Maitland was head of the War Trade Department in 1917-1919, while Lord Wolmer (son of Lord Selborne and grandson of Lord Salisbury) was assistant director in 1916-1918. Henry Birchenough was a member or chairman of several committees dealing with related matters. R. S. Rait was a member of the department from its creation in 1915 to the end of the war; H. W. C. Davis was a member in 1915 and a member of the newly created War Trade Advisory Committee thereafter. Harold Butler was secretary to the Foreign Trade Department of the Foreign Office (1916-1917). H. D. Henderson (who has been a Fellow of All Souls since 1934) was secretary of the Cotton Control Board (1917-1919).
The Board of Agriculture was dominated by members of the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. Lord Selborne was President of the board in 1915-1916, and Prothero (Lord Ernie) in 1916-1919. Milner and Selborne were chairmen of the two important committees of the board in 1915 and 1916. These sought to establish as a war measure (and ultimately as a postwar measure also) government-guaranteed prices for agricultural products at so high a level that domestic production of adequate supplies would be insured. This had been advocated by Milner for many years but was not obtained on a permanent basis until after 1930, although used on a temporary basis in 1917-1919. The membership of these committees was largely made up of members of the Cecil Bloc. The second Viscount Goschen (son of Milner's old friend and grandfather-in-law of Milner's step-grandson) was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board; Lord Astor was chairman of a dependent committee on milk supplies; Sothern Holland was controller of the Cultivation Department within the Food Production Department of the board (1918); Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton was deputy director of the Women's Branch; Lady Alicia Cecil was assistant director of horticulture in the Food Production Department; and Edward Strutt (brother- in-law of Balfour), who had been a member of both the Milner and Selborne Committees, was technical adviser to Prothero during his term as President and was the draftsman of the Corn Production Act of 1917. He later acted as one of Milner's assistants in the effort to establish a tariff in 1923. His sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was written by his nephew (and Balfour's nephew) Lord Rayleigh.
In the Colonial Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918-1921; George Fiddes (of the Milner Kindergarten) was Permanent Under Secretary in 1916-1921; Steel-Maitland was Parliamentary Under Secretary in 1915-1917; while Amery was in the same position in 1919-1921.
In intelligence and public information, we find John Buchan as head of the Information Department of the War Office, with John Dove and B. H. Sumner (the present Warden of All Souls) in military intelligence. H. W. C. Davis was general editor of the Oxford Pamphlets justifying Britain's role in the war, while Algernon Cecil (nephew of Lord Salisbury) was in the intelligence division of the Admiralty and later in the historical section of the Foreign Office. J. W. Headlam-Morley was adviser on all historical matters at Wellington House (the propaganda department) in 1915-1918 and assistant director of political intelligence in the Department of Information in 1917-1918, ultimately being shifted to similar work in the Foreign Office in 1918.
In the War Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918, while Amery was assistant to the Secretary from 1917 until Milner took him to the Colonial Office a year or so later.
This enumeration, by no means complete, indicates the all-pervasive influence of this small clique in the later years of the war. This influence was not devoted exclusively to winning the war, and, as time went on, it was directed increasingly toward the postwar settlement. As a result, both groups tended more and more to concentrate in the Foreign Office. There G. W. Prothero, an old member of the Cecil Bloc, was put in charge of the preparations for the future peace conference. Depending chiefly on his own branch of the Foreign Office (the Historical Section), but also using men and materials from the War Trade Intelligence Department and the Intelligence Section of the Admiralty, he prepared a large number of reports on questions that might arise at the Peace Conference (1917- 1919). In 1920, 155 volumes of these reports were published under the title Peace Handbooks. A glance at any complete list of these will show that a very large number of the "experts" who wrote them were from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. About the same time, Phillimore and Zimmern prepared drafts for the organization of the future League of Nations. Most of the group went en masse to the Peace Conference at Paris as expert advisers, and anyone familiar with the history of the Peace Conference cannot fail to recognize names which we have mentioned frequently. At about this time, Lloyd George began to get out of hand as far as the Milner Group was concerned, and doubtless also as far as the Cecil Bloc was concerned. Some of this was caused by the weakness of Balfour, titular head of the latter group, but much more was caused by the fact that the Group could not control Lloyd George either in his electoral campaign in December 1918 or in his negotiations in the Council of Four from March to June 1919. Lloyd George was perfectly willing to use the abilities of the Milner Group in administration, but, when it came to an appeal to the electorate, as in the "khaki election," he had no respect for the Group's judgment or advice. Lloyd George realized that the electorate was hysterical with hatred of Germany, and was willing to appeal to that feeling if he could ride into office again on its impetus. The Milner Croup, on the other hand, was eager to get rid of the Kaiser, the Prussian officers' corps, and even the Junker landlords, but, once Germany was defeated, their feeling of animosity against her (which had waxed strong since before 1896) vanished. By 1919 they began to think in terms of balance of power and of the need to reconstruct Germany against the dangers of "bolshevism" on one hand and of "French militarism" on the other, and they felt that if Germany were made democratic and treated in a friendly fashion she could be incorporated into the British world system as well as the Cape Boers had been. The intellectual climate of the Milner Group early in 1919 has been described by a man who was, at this time, close to the Group, Harold Nicolson, in his volume Peacemaking, 1919.
This point of view was never thoroughly thought out by the Group. It was apparently based on the belief that if Germany were treated in a conciliatory fashion she could be won from her aggressive attitudes and become a civilized member of the British world system. This may have been possible, but, if so, the plan was very badly executed, because the aggressive elements in Germany were not eliminated and the conciliatory elements were not encouraged in a concrete fashion. This failure, however, was partly caused by the pressure of public opinion, by the refusal of the French to accept this concept as an adequate goal of foreign policy, and by the failure to analyze the methods of the policy in a sound and adequate fashion. The first step toward this policy was made by Milner himself as early as October 1918, when he issued a warning not to denounce "the whole German nation as monsters of iniquity" or to carry out a policy of punishment and reprisal against them." The outburst of public indignation at this sentiment was so great that "the whole band of men who had learned under him in South Africa to appreciate his patriotism united to testify to him their affectionate respect." This quotation from one of the band, Basil Williams, refers to a testimonial given by the Group to their leader in 1918.
Another evidence of this feeling will be found in a volume of Alfred Zimmern's, published in 1922 under the title Europe in Convalescence and devoted to regretting Britain's postwar policies and especially the election of 1918. Strangely enough, Zimmern, although most articulate in this volume, was basically more anti-German than the other members of the Group and did not share their rather naive belief that the Germans could be redeemed merely by the victors tossing away the advantages of victory. Zimmern had a greater degree of sympathy for the French idea that the Germans should give more concrete examples of a reformed spirit before they were allowed to run freely in civilized society.(3) Halifax, on the other hand, was considerably more influenced by popular feeling in 1918 and years later. He shared the public hysteria against Germany in 1918 to a degree which he later wished to forget, just as in 1937 he shared the appeasement policy toward Germany to a degree he would now doubtless want to forget. Both of these men, however were not of the inner circle of the Milner Group. The sentiments of that inner circle, men like Kerr, Brand, and Dawson, can be found in the speeches of the first, The Times editorials of the last, and the articles of The Round Table. They can also be seen in the letters of John Dove. The latter, writing to Brand, 4 October 1923, stated: "It seems to me that the most disastrous affect of Poincare's policy would be the final collapse of democracy in Germany, the risk of which has been pointed out in The Round Table. The irony of the whole situation is that if the Junkers should capture the Reich again, the same old antagonisms will revive and we shall find ourselves, willy-nilly, lined up again with France to avert a danger which French action has again called into being.... Even if Smuts follows up his fine speech, the situation may have changed so much before the Imperial Conference is over that people who think like him and us may find themselves baffled.... I doubt if we shall again have as good a chance of getting a peaceful democracy set up in Germany."
The Milner Group was out of power for a decade from 1906 to 1915. We have already indicated our grounds for believing that this condition was not regarded with distaste, since its members were engaged in important activities of their own and approved of the conduct of foreign policy (their chief field of interest) by the Liberal Party under Asquith, Grey, and Haldane. During this period came the Union of South Africa, The Morley- Minto reforms, the naval race with Germany, the military conversations with France, the agreement of 1907 with Russia, the British attitude against Germany in the Agadir crisis (a crisis to whose creation The Times had contributed no little material) — in fact, a whole series of events in which the point of view of the Milner Group was carried out just as if they were in office. To be sure, in domestic matters such as the budget dispute and the ensuing House of Lords dispute, and in the question of Home Rule for Ireland, the Milner Group did not regard the Liberal achievements with complete satisfaction, but in none of these were the members of the Milner Group diehards (as members of the Cecil Bloc sometimes were). (1) But with the outbreak of war, the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc wanted to come to power and wanted it badly, chiefly because control of the government in wartime would make it possible to direct events toward the postwar settlement which the Group envisaged. The Group also believed that the war could be used by them to fasten on Britain the illiberal economic regulation of which they had been dreaming since Chamberlain resigned in 1903 (at least).
The Group got to power in 1916 by a method which they repeated with the Labour Party in 1931. By a secret intrigue with a parvenu leader of the government, the Group offered to make him head of a new government if he would split his own party and become Prime Minister, supported by the Group and whatever members he could split off from his own party. The chief difference between 1916 and 1931 is that in the former year the minority that was being betrayed was the Group's own social class — in fact, the Liberal Party members of the Cecil Bloc. Another difference is that in 1916 the plot worked — the Liberal Party was split and permanently destroyed — while in 1931 the plotters broke off only a fragment of the Labour Party and damaged it only temporarily (for fourteen years). This last difference, however, was not caused by any lack of skill in carrying out the intrigue but by the sociological differences between the Liberal Party and the Labour Party in the twentieth century. The latter was riding the wave of the future, while the former was merely one of two "teams" put on the field by the same school for an intramural game, and, as such, it was bound to fuse with its temporary antagonist as soon as the future produced an extramural challenger. This strange (to an outsider) point of view will explain why Asquith had no real animosity for Bonar Law or Balfour (who really betrayed him) but devoted the rest of his life to belittling the actions of Lloyd George. Asquith talked later about how he was deceived (and even lied to) in December 1915, but never made any personal attack on Bonar Law, who did the prevaricating (if any). The actions of Bonar Law were acceptable in the code of British politics, a code largely constructed on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow, but Lloyd George's actions, which were considerably less deliberate and cold-blooded, were quite unforgivable, coming as they did from a parvenu who had been built up to a high place in the Liberal Party because of his undeniable personal ability, but who, nonetheless, was an outsider who had never been near the playing fields of Eton.
In the coalition governments of May 1915 and December 1916, members of the Cecil Bloc took the more obvious positions (as befitted their seniority), while members of the Milner Group took the less conspicuous places, but by 1918 the latter group had the whole situation tied up in a neat package and held all the strings.
In the first coalition (May 1915), Lansdowne came into the Cabinet without portfolio, Curzon as Lord Privy Seal, Bonar Law at the Colonial Office, Austen Chamberlain at the India Office, Balfour at the Admiralty, Selborne as President of the Board of Agriculture, Walter Long as President of the Local Government Board, Sir Edward Carson as Attorney General, F. E. Smith as Solicitor General, Lord Robert Cecil as Under Secretary in the Foreign Office, and Arthur Steel-Maitland as Under Secretary in the Colonial Office. Of these eleven names, at least nine were members of the Cecil Bloc, and four were close to the Milner Group (Cecil, Balfour, Steel-Maitland, and Selborne).
In the second coalition government (December 1916), Milner was Minister without Portfolio; Curzon was Lord President of the Council; Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Robert Finlay, Lord Chancellor; the Earl of Crawford, Lord Privy Seal; Sir George Cave, Home Secretary; Arthur Balfour, Foreign Secretary; The Earl of Derby, War Secretary; Walter Long, Colonial Secretary; Austen Chamberlain, at the India Office; Sir Edward Carson, First Lord of the Admiralty; Henry E. Duke, Chief Secretary for Ireland; H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education; R. E. Prothero, President of the Board of Agriculture; Sir Albert Stanley, President of the Board of Trade; F. E. Smith, Attorney General; Robert Cecil, Minister of Blockade; Lord Hardinge, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs; Steel-Maitland, Under Secretary for the Colonies; and Lord Wolmer (son of Lord Selborne), assistant director of the War Trade Department. Of these twenty names, eleven, at least, were members of the Cecil Bloc, and four or five were members of the Milner Group.
Milner himself became the second most important figure in the government (after Lloyd George), especially while he was Minister without Portfolio. He was chiefly interested in food policy, war trade regulations, and postwar settlements. He was chairman of a committee to increase home production of food (1915) and of a committee on postwar reconstruction (1916). From the former came the food- growing policy adopted in 1917, and from the latter came the Ministry of Health set up in 1919. In 1917 he went with Lloyd George to a meeting of the Allied War Council in Rome and from there on a mission to Russia. He went to France after the German victories in March 1918, and was the principal influence in the appointment of Foch as Supreme Commander in the west. In April he became Secretary of State for War, and, after the election of December 1918, became Colonial Secretary. He was one of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles. Of Milner's role at this time, John Buchan wrote in his memoirs: "In the Great War from 1916 to 1918, he was the executant of the War Cabinet who separated the sense from the nonsense in the deliberations of that body, and was responsible for its chief practical achievements. To him were largely due the fruitful things which emerged from the struggle, the new status of the Dominions, and the notable advances in British social policy." In all of these actions Milner remained as unobtrusive as possible. Throughout this period Milner's opinion of Lloyd George was on the highest level. Writing twenty years later in The Commonwealth of God, Lionel Curtis recorded two occasions in which Milner praised Lloyd George in the highest terms. On one of these he called him a greater war leader than Chatham.
At this period it was not always possible to distinguish between the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group, but it is notable that the members of the former who were later clearly members of the latter were generally in the fields in which Milner was most interested. In general, Milner and his Group dominated Lloyd George during the period from 1917 to 1921. As Prime Minister, Lloyd George had three members of the Group as his secretaries (P. H. Kerr, 1916-1922; W. G. S. Adams, 1916-1919; E. W. M. Grigg, 1921- 1922) and Waldorf Astor as his parliamentary secretary (1917-1918). The chief decisions were made by the War Cabinet and Imperial War Cabinet, whose membership merged and fluctuated but in 1917-1918 consisted of Lloyd George, Milner, Curzon, and Smuts — that is, two members of the Milner Group, one of the Cecil Bloc, with the Prime Minister himself. The secretary to these groups was Maurice Hankey (later a member of the Milner Group), and the editor of the published reports of the War Cabinet was W. G. S. Adams. Amery was assistant secretary, while Meston was a member of the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917. Frederick Liddell (Fellow of All Souls) was made First Parliamentary Counsel in 1917 and held the position for eleven years, following this post with a fifteen-year period of service as counsel to the Speaker (1928-1943). (2)
Within the various government departments a somewhat similar situation prevailed. The Foreign Office in its topmost ranks was held by the Cecil Bloc, with Balfour as Secretary of State (1916-1919), followed by Curzon (1919-1924). When Balfour went to the United States on a mission in 1917, he took along Ian Malcolm (brother-in-law of Dougal Malcolm). Malcolm was later Balfour's private secretary at the Peace Conference in 1919. In Washington, Balfour had as deputy chairman to the mission R. H. Brand. In London, as we have seen, Robert Cecil was Parliamentary Under Secretary and later Assistant Secretary. In the Political Intelligence Department, Alfred Zimmern was the chief figure. G. W. Prothero was director of the Historical Section and was, like Cecil and Zimmern, chiefly concerned with the future peace settlement. He was succeeded by J. W. Headlam-Morley, who held the post of historical adviser from 1920 to his death in 1928. All of these persons were members of the Cecil Bloc or Milner Group.
In the India Office we need mention only a few names, as this subject will receive a closer scrutiny later. Austen Chamberlain was Secretary of State in 1915-1917 and gave the original impetus toward the famous act of 1919. Sir Frederick Duke (a member of the Round Table Group, whom we shall mention later) was chief adviser to Chamberlain's successor, E. S. Montagu, and became Permanent Under Secretary in 1920. Sir Malcolm Seton (also a member of the Round Table Group from 1913 onward) was Assistant Under Secretary (1919-1924) and later Deputy Under Secretary.
In blockade and shipping, Robert Cecil was Minister of Blockade (1916-1918), while Reginald Sothern Holland organized the attack on German trade in the earlier period (1914). M. L. Gwyer was legal adviser to the Ministry of Shipping during the war and to the Ministry of Health after the war (1917-1926), while J. Arthur Salter (later a contributor to The Round Table and a Fellow of All Souls for almost twenty years) was director of ship requisitioning in 1917 and later secretary to the Allied Maritime Transport Council and chairman of the Allied Maritime Transport Executive (1918). After the war he was a member of the Supreme Economic Council and general secretary to the Reparations Commission (1919-1922).
A. H. D. R. Steel-Maitland was head of the War Trade Department in 1917-1919, while Lord Wolmer (son of Lord Selborne and grandson of Lord Salisbury) was assistant director in 1916-1918. Henry Birchenough was a member or chairman of several committees dealing with related matters. R. S. Rait was a member of the department from its creation in 1915 to the end of the war; H. W. C. Davis was a member in 1915 and a member of the newly created War Trade Advisory Committee thereafter. Harold Butler was secretary to the Foreign Trade Department of the Foreign Office (1916-1917). H. D. Henderson (who has been a Fellow of All Souls since 1934) was secretary of the Cotton Control Board (1917-1919).
The Board of Agriculture was dominated by members of the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. Lord Selborne was President of the board in 1915-1916, and Prothero (Lord Ernie) in 1916-1919. Milner and Selborne were chairmen of the two important committees of the board in 1915 and 1916. These sought to establish as a war measure (and ultimately as a postwar measure also) government-guaranteed prices for agricultural products at so high a level that domestic production of adequate supplies would be insured. This had been advocated by Milner for many years but was not obtained on a permanent basis until after 1930, although used on a temporary basis in 1917-1919. The membership of these committees was largely made up of members of the Cecil Bloc. The second Viscount Goschen (son of Milner's old friend and grandfather-in-law of Milner's step-grandson) was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board; Lord Astor was chairman of a dependent committee on milk supplies; Sothern Holland was controller of the Cultivation Department within the Food Production Department of the board (1918); Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton was deputy director of the Women's Branch; Lady Alicia Cecil was assistant director of horticulture in the Food Production Department; and Edward Strutt (brother- in-law of Balfour), who had been a member of both the Milner and Selborne Committees, was technical adviser to Prothero during his term as President and was the draftsman of the Corn Production Act of 1917. He later acted as one of Milner's assistants in the effort to establish a tariff in 1923. His sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was written by his nephew (and Balfour's nephew) Lord Rayleigh.
In the Colonial Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918-1921; George Fiddes (of the Milner Kindergarten) was Permanent Under Secretary in 1916-1921; Steel-Maitland was Parliamentary Under Secretary in 1915-1917; while Amery was in the same position in 1919-1921.
In intelligence and public information, we find John Buchan as head of the Information Department of the War Office, with John Dove and B. H. Sumner (the present Warden of All Souls) in military intelligence. H. W. C. Davis was general editor of the Oxford Pamphlets justifying Britain's role in the war, while Algernon Cecil (nephew of Lord Salisbury) was in the intelligence division of the Admiralty and later in the historical section of the Foreign Office. J. W. Headlam-Morley was adviser on all historical matters at Wellington House (the propaganda department) in 1915-1918 and assistant director of political intelligence in the Department of Information in 1917-1918, ultimately being shifted to similar work in the Foreign Office in 1918.
In the War Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918, while Amery was assistant to the Secretary from 1917 until Milner took him to the Colonial Office a year or so later.
This enumeration, by no means complete, indicates the all-pervasive influence of this small clique in the later years of the war. This influence was not devoted exclusively to winning the war, and, as time went on, it was directed increasingly toward the postwar settlement. As a result, both groups tended more and more to concentrate in the Foreign Office. There G. W. Prothero, an old member of the Cecil Bloc, was put in charge of the preparations for the future peace conference. Depending chiefly on his own branch of the Foreign Office (the Historical Section), but also using men and materials from the War Trade Intelligence Department and the Intelligence Section of the Admiralty, he prepared a large number of reports on questions that might arise at the Peace Conference (1917- 1919). In 1920, 155 volumes of these reports were published under the title Peace Handbooks. A glance at any complete list of these will show that a very large number of the "experts" who wrote them were from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. About the same time, Phillimore and Zimmern prepared drafts for the organization of the future League of Nations. Most of the group went en masse to the Peace Conference at Paris as expert advisers, and anyone familiar with the history of the Peace Conference cannot fail to recognize names which we have mentioned frequently. At about this time, Lloyd George began to get out of hand as far as the Milner Group was concerned, and doubtless also as far as the Cecil Bloc was concerned. Some of this was caused by the weakness of Balfour, titular head of the latter group, but much more was caused by the fact that the Group could not control Lloyd George either in his electoral campaign in December 1918 or in his negotiations in the Council of Four from March to June 1919. Lloyd George was perfectly willing to use the abilities of the Milner Group in administration, but, when it came to an appeal to the electorate, as in the "khaki election," he had no respect for the Group's judgment or advice. Lloyd George realized that the electorate was hysterical with hatred of Germany, and was willing to appeal to that feeling if he could ride into office again on its impetus. The Milner Croup, on the other hand, was eager to get rid of the Kaiser, the Prussian officers' corps, and even the Junker landlords, but, once Germany was defeated, their feeling of animosity against her (which had waxed strong since before 1896) vanished. By 1919 they began to think in terms of balance of power and of the need to reconstruct Germany against the dangers of "bolshevism" on one hand and of "French militarism" on the other, and they felt that if Germany were made democratic and treated in a friendly fashion she could be incorporated into the British world system as well as the Cape Boers had been. The intellectual climate of the Milner Group early in 1919 has been described by a man who was, at this time, close to the Group, Harold Nicolson, in his volume Peacemaking, 1919.
This point of view was never thoroughly thought out by the Group. It was apparently based on the belief that if Germany were treated in a conciliatory fashion she could be won from her aggressive attitudes and become a civilized member of the British world system. This may have been possible, but, if so, the plan was very badly executed, because the aggressive elements in Germany were not eliminated and the conciliatory elements were not encouraged in a concrete fashion. This failure, however, was partly caused by the pressure of public opinion, by the refusal of the French to accept this concept as an adequate goal of foreign policy, and by the failure to analyze the methods of the policy in a sound and adequate fashion. The first step toward this policy was made by Milner himself as early as October 1918, when he issued a warning not to denounce "the whole German nation as monsters of iniquity" or to carry out a policy of punishment and reprisal against them." The outburst of public indignation at this sentiment was so great that "the whole band of men who had learned under him in South Africa to appreciate his patriotism united to testify to him their affectionate respect." This quotation from one of the band, Basil Williams, refers to a testimonial given by the Group to their leader in 1918.
Another evidence of this feeling will be found in a volume of Alfred Zimmern's, published in 1922 under the title Europe in Convalescence and devoted to regretting Britain's postwar policies and especially the election of 1918. Strangely enough, Zimmern, although most articulate in this volume, was basically more anti-German than the other members of the Group and did not share their rather naive belief that the Germans could be redeemed merely by the victors tossing away the advantages of victory. Zimmern had a greater degree of sympathy for the French idea that the Germans should give more concrete examples of a reformed spirit before they were allowed to run freely in civilized society.(3) Halifax, on the other hand, was considerably more influenced by popular feeling in 1918 and years later. He shared the public hysteria against Germany in 1918 to a degree which he later wished to forget, just as in 1937 he shared the appeasement policy toward Germany to a degree he would now doubtless want to forget. Both of these men, however were not of the inner circle of the Milner Group. The sentiments of that inner circle, men like Kerr, Brand, and Dawson, can be found in the speeches of the first, The Times editorials of the last, and the articles of The Round Table. They can also be seen in the letters of John Dove. The latter, writing to Brand, 4 October 1923, stated: "It seems to me that the most disastrous affect of Poincare's policy would be the final collapse of democracy in Germany, the risk of which has been pointed out in The Round Table. The irony of the whole situation is that if the Junkers should capture the Reich again, the same old antagonisms will revive and we shall find ourselves, willy-nilly, lined up again with France to avert a danger which French action has again called into being.... Even if Smuts follows up his fine speech, the situation may have changed so much before the Imperial Conference is over that people who think like him and us may find themselves baffled.... I doubt if we shall again have as good a chance of getting a peaceful democracy set up in Germany."