Chapter 13: The Second World War, 1939-1945
The Milner Group played a considerable role in the Second World War, not scattered throughout the various agencies associated with the great struggle, but concentrated in four or five chief fiefs. Among these were: (1) the Research and Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office; (2) the British Embassy in Washington; (3) the Ministry of Information; and (4) those agencies concerned with economic mobilization and economic reconstruction. Considering the age of most of the inner core of the Milner Group during the Second World War (the youngest, Lothian, was 57 in 1939; Hichens was 65; Brand was 61; Dawson was 65; and Curtis was 67), they accomplished a great deal. Unable, in most cases, to serve themselves, except in an advisory capacity, they filled their chief fiefs with their younger associates. In most cases, these were recruited from All Souls, but occasionally they were obtained elsewhere.
We have already indicated how the Research and Press Department of Chatham House was made into the Research and Intelligence Department bf the Foreign Office, at first unofficially and then officially. This was dominated by Lionel Curtis and Arnold Toynbee, the latter as director of the department for the whole period 1939-1946. Others who were associated with this activity were B. H. Sumner (Warden of All Souls), C. A. Macartney, A. E. Zimmern, J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, and most of the paid staff from Chatham House. Zimmern was deputy director in 1943-1945, and Wheeler-Bennett was deputy director in 1945.
Of even greater significance was the gathering of Milner Group members and their recruits in Washington. The Group had based most of their foreign policy since 1920 on the hope of "closer union" with the United States, and they realized that American intervention in the war was absolutely essential to insure a British victory. Accordingly, more than a dozen members of the Group were in Washington during the war, seeking to carry on this policy.
Lord Lothian was named Ambassador to the United States as soon as the war began. It was felt that his long acquaintance with the country and the personal connections built up during almost fifteen years as Rhodes Secretary more than counteracted his intimate relationship with the notorious Cliveden Set, especially as this latter relationship was unknown to most Americans. On Lothian's unexpected and lamented death in December 1940, the position in Washington was considered to be of such crucial importance that Lord Halifax was shifted to the vacant post from the Foreign Office. He retained his position in the War Cabinet. Thus the post at Washington was raised to a position which no foreign legation had ever had before. Lord Halifax continued to hold the post until 1946, a year after the war was actually finished. During most of the period, he was surrounded by members of the Milner Group, chiefly Fellows of All Souls, so that it was almost impossible to turn around in the British Embassy without running into a member of that select academic circle. The most important of these were Lord Brand, Harold Butler, and Arthur Salter.
Lord Brand was in America from March 1941 to May 1946, as head of the British Food Mission for three years and as representative of the British Treasury for two years. He was also chairman of the British Supply Council in North America in 1942 and again in 1945-1946. He did not resign his position as managing director of Lazard Brothers until May 1944. Closely associated with Brand was his protege, Adam D. Marris, son of Sir William Marris of the Kindergarten, who was employed at Lazard Brothers from 1929 to the outbreak of war, then spent a brief period in the Ministry of Economic Warfare in London. In 1940 he came to the Embassy in Washington, originally as First Secretary, later as Counselor. After the war he was, for six months, secretary general of the Emergency Economic Committee for Europe. In February 1946 he returned to Lazard Brothers.
Harold Butler (Sir Harold since 1946) came to Washington in 1942 with the rank of minister. He stayed for four years, being chiefly concerned with public relations. Sir Arthur Salter, who married a Washington lady in 1940, came to America in 1941 as head of the British Merchant Shipping Mission. He stayed until UNRRA was set up early in 1944, when he joined the new organization as Senior Deputy Director General. A year later he joined the Cabinet as Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster. Sir Arthur was well qualified as a shipping expert, having been engaged intermittently in government shipping problems since he left Brasenose College in 1904. His close personal relations with Lord Halifax went back to an even earlier period, when they both were students at Oxford.
Among the lesser persons who came to Washington during the war, we should mention four members of All Souls: I. Berlin, J. G. Foster, R. M. Makins, and J. H. A. Sparrow. Isaiah Berlin, one of the newer recruits to the Milner Group, made his way into this select circle by winning a Fellowship to All Souls in 1932, the year after he graduated from Corpus Christi. Through this connection, he became a close friend of Mr. and Mrs. H. A. L. Fisher and has been a Fellow and Tutor of New College since 1938. In 1941 he came to New York to work with J. W. Wheeler-Bennett in the Ministry of Information's American branch but stayed for no more than a year. In 1942 he became First Secretary in the Embassy in Washington, a position but recently vacated by Adam Marris. After the war he went for a brief period of four months to a similar post in the British Embassy in Moscow. In 1949 he came to Harvard University as visiting lecturer on Russia.
John Galway Foster is another recent recruit to the Milner Group and, like Berlin, won his entry by way of All Souls (1924). He is also a graduate of New College and from 1935 to 1939 was lecturer in Private International Law at Oxford. In 1939 he went to the Embassy in Washington as First Secretary and stayed for almost five years. In 1944 he was commissioned a brigadier on special service and the following year gained considerable prestige by winning a Conservative seat in Parliament in the face of the Labour tidal wave. He is still a Fellow of All Souls, after twenty-five years, and this fact alone would indicate he has a position as an important member of the Group.
Roger Mellor Makins, son of a Conservative M.P., was elected a Fellow of All Souls immediately after graduation from Christ Church in 1925. He joined the diplomatic service in 1928 and spent time in London, Washington, and (briefly) Oslo in the next nine years. In 1937 he became assistant adviser on League of Nations affairs to the Foreign Office. He was secretary to the British delegation to the Evian Conference on Refugees from Germany in 1938 and became secretary to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees set up at that meeting. In 1939 he returned to the Foreign Office as adviser on League of Nations Affairs but soon became a First Secretary; he was adviser to the British delegation at the New York meeting of the International Labour Conference in 1941 and the following year joined the staff of the Resident Minister in West Africa. When the Allied Headquarters in the Mediterranean area was set up in 1943, he joined the staff of the Resident British Minister with that unit. At the end of the war, in 1945, he went to the Embassy in Washington with the rank of Minister. In this post he had the inestimable advantage that his wife, whom he married in 1934, was the daughter of the late Dwight F. Davis, Secretary of War in the Hoover Administration. During this period Makins played an important role at various international organizations. He was the United Kingdom representative on the Interim Commission for Food and Agriculture of the United Nations in 1945; he was adviser to the United Kingdom delegation to the first FAO Conference at Quebec the same year; he was a delegate to the Atlantic City meeting of UNRRA in the following year. In 1947 he left Washington to become Assistant Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office in London.
Another important member of All Souls who appeared briefly in Washington during the war was John H. A. Sparrow. Graduated from Winchester School and New College by 1927, he became an Eldon Law Scholar and a Fellow of All Souls in 1929. He is still a Fellow of the latter after twenty years. Commissioned in the Coldstream Guards in 1940, he was in Washington on a confidential military mission during most of 1940 and was attached to the War Office from 1942 to the end of the war.
Certain other members of the Group were to be found in the United States during the period under discussion. We have already mentioned the services rendered to the Ministry of Information by J. W. Wheeler-Bennett in New York from 1939 to 1944. Robert J. Stopford was Financial Counselor to the British Embassy in 1940-1943. We should also mention that F. W. Eggleston, chief Australian member of the Group, was Australian Minister in Washington from 1944 to 1946. And the story of the Milner Group's activities in Washington would not be complete without at least mentioning Percy E. Corbett.
Percy Corbett of Prince Edward Island, Canada, took a M.A. degree at McGill University in 1915 and went to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar. He was a Fellow of All Souls in 1920-1928 and a member of the staff of the League of Nations in 1920-1924. He was Professor of Roman Law at McGill University from 1924 to 1937 and had been Professor of Government and Jurisprudence and chairman of the Department of Political Science at Yale since 1944. He has always been close to the Milner Group, participating in many of their Canadian activities, such as the Canadian Royal Institute of International Affairs, the unofficial British Commonwealth relations conferences, and the Institute of Pacific Relations. He was chairman of the Pacific Council of the last organization in 1942. During the war he spent much of his time in the United States, especially in Washington, engaged in lobbying activities for the British Embassy, chiefly in Rhodes Scholarship and academic circles but also in government agencies. Since the war ended, he has obtained, by his position at Yale, a place of considerable influence, especially since Yale began, in 1948, to publish its new quarterly review called World Politics. On this review, Professor Corbett is one of the more influential members. At present he must be numbered among the three most important Canadian members of the Milner Group, the other two being Vincent Massey and George Parkin Glazebrook.
In view of the emphasis which the Milner Group has always placed on publicity and the need to control the chief avenues by which the general public obtains information on public affairs, it is not surprising to find that the Ministry of Information was one of the fiefs of the Group from its establishment in 1939.
At the outbreak of war, H. A. L. Fisher had been Governor of the BBC for four years. It was probably as a result of this connection that L. F. Rushbrook Williams, whom we have already mentioned in connection with Indian affairs and as a member of All Souls since 1914, became Eastern Service Director of the BBC. He was later adviser on Middle East affairs to the Ministry of Information but left this, in 1944, to become an editor of The Times. Edward Griggs, now Lord Altrincham, was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information from its creation to the Cabinet revision of 1940, when he shifted to the War Office. J. W. Wheeler-Bennett and Isaiah Berlin were with the New York office of the Ministry of Information, as we have seen, the former throughout the war and the latter in 1941-1942. H. V. Hodson, Fellow of All Souls and probably the most important of the newer recruits to the Milner Group, was Director of the Empire Division of the Ministry of Information from its creation in 1939 until he went to India as Reforms Commissioner in 1941-1942. And finally, Cyril John Radcliffe (Sir Cyril after 1944), a graduate of New College in 1922 and a Fellow of All Souls for fifteen years (1922-1937), son-in-law of Lord Charnwood since 1939, was in the Ministry of Information for the whole period of the war, more than four years of it as Director General of the whole organization. (1)
In addition to these three great fiefs (the Research and Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, the Embassy in Washington, and the Ministry of Information), the Milner Group exercised considerable influence in those branches of the administration concerned with emergency economic regulations, although here the highest positions were reserved to those members of the Cecil Bloc closest to the Milner Group. Oliver Lyttelton, whose mother was a member of the Group, was Controller of Non-Ferrous Metals in 1939-1940, was President of the Board of Trade in 1940-1941, and was Minister of Production in 1942-1945. Lord Wolmer (Lord Selborne since 1942) was Director of Cement in the Ministry of Works in 1940-1942 and Minister of Economic Warfare in 1942-1945. In this connection, it should be mentioned that the Milner Group had developed certain economic interests in non-ferrous metals and in cement in the period of the 1920s and 1930s. The former developed both from their interest in colonial mines, which were the source of the ores, and from their control of electrical utilities, wllich supplied much of the power needed to reduce these ores. The center of these interests was to be found, on the one hand, in the Rhodes Trust and the economic holdings of the associates of Milner and Rhodes like R. S. Holland, Abe Bailey, P. L. Gell, etc., and, on the other hand, in the utility interests of Lazard Brothers and of the Hoare family. The ramifications of these interests are too complicated, and too well concealed, to be described in any detail here, but we might point out that Lord Milner was a director of Rio Tinto, that Dougal Malcolm was a director of Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines, that Samuel Hoare was a director of Birmingham Aluminum Casting Company until he took public office, that the Hoare family had extensive holdings in Associated Tin Mines of Nigeria, in British- American Tin Corporation, in London Tin Corporation, etc.; that R. S. Holland was an Anglo-Spanish Construction Company, on British Copper Manufacturers, and on the British Metal Corporation; that Lyttelton Gell was a director of Huelva Copper and of the Zinc Corporation; that Oliver Lyttelton was managing director of the British Metal Corporation and a director of Metallgesellschaft, the German light-metals monopoly. The chief member of the Group in the cement industry was Lord Meston, who was placed on many important corporations after his return from India, including the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers and the British Portland Cement Manufacturers. The third Lord Selborne was chairman of the Cement Makers Federation from 1934 to 1940, resigning to take charge of the government's cement-regulation program.
In lesser posts in these activities, we might mention the following. Charles R. S. Harris, whom we have already mentioned as an associate of Brand, a Fellow of All Souls for fifteen years, a leader-writer on The Times for ten years, the authority on Duns Scotus who wrote a book on Germany's foreign indebtedness for Chatham House, was in the Ministry of Economic Warfare in 1939-1940. He then spent two years in Iceland for the Foreign Office, and three years with the War Office, ending up in 1944-1945 as a member of the Allied Control Commission for Italy. H. V. Hodson was principal assistant secretary and later head of the Non-Munitions Division of the Ministry of Production from his return from India to the end of the war (1942-1945). Douglas P. T. Jay, a graduate of New College in 1930 and a Fellow of All Souls in the next seven years, was on the staff of The Times and The Economist in the period 1929-1937 and was city editor of The Daily Herald in 19371941. He was assistant secretary to the Ministry of Supply in 1941-1943 and principal assistant secretary to the Board of Trade in 1943-1945. After the Labour government came to power in the summer of 1945, he was personal assistant to the Prime Minister (Clement Attlee) until he became a Labour M.P. in 1946. Richard Pares, son of the famous authority on Russia, the late Sir Bernard Pares, and son-in-law of the famous historian Sir Maurice Powicke, was a Fellow of All Souls for twenty-one years after he graduated from Balliol in 1924. He was a lecturer at New College for eleven years, 1929-1940 and then was with the Board of Trade for the duration of the war, 1940-1945. Since the war, he has been Professor of History at Edinburgh. During most of the war his father, Sir Bernard Pares, lectured in the United States as a pro- Russian propagandist in the pay of the Ministry of Information. We have already mentioned the brief period in which Adam Marris worked for the Ministry of Economic Warfare in 1939-1940.
As the war went on, the Milner Group shifted their attention increasingly to the subject of postwar planning and reconstruction. Much of this was conducted through Chatham House. When the war began, Toynbee wrote a letter to the Council of the RIIA, in which he said: "If we get through the present crisis and are given a further chance to try and put the world in order, we shall then feel a need to take a broader and deeper view of our problems than we were inclined to take after the War of 1914-1918.... I believe this possibility has been in Mr. Lionel Curtis's mind since the time when he first conceived the idea of the Institute; his Civitas Dei and my Study of History are two reconnaissances of this historical background to the study of contemporary international affairs." (2) At the end of 1942 the Group founded a quarterly journal devoted to reconstruction. It was founded technically under the auspices of the London School of Economics, but the editor was G. N. Clark, a member of All Souls since 1912 and Chichele Professor of Economic History from 1931 to 1943. The title of this journal was Agenda, and its editorial offices were in Chatham House. These tentative plans to dominate the postwar reconstruction efforts received a rude jolt in August 1945, when the General Election removed the Conservative government from power and brought to office a Labour government. The influence of the Group in Labour circles has always been rather slight.
Since this blow, the Milner Group has been in eclipse, and it is not clear what has been happening. (3) Its control of The Times, of The Round Table, of Chatham House, of the Rhodes Trust, of All Souls, and of Oxford generally has continued but has been used without centralized purpose or conviction. Most of the original members of the Group have retired from active affairs; the newer recruits have not the experience or the intellectual conviction, or the social contacts, which allowed the older members to wield such great power. The disasters into which the Group directed British policy in the years before 1940 are not such as to allow their prestige to continue undiminished. In imperial affairs, their policies have been largely a failure, with Ireland gone, India divided and going, Burma drifting away, and even South Africa more distant than at any time since 1910. In foreign policy their actions almost destroyed western civilization, or at least the European center of it. The Times has lost its influence; The Round Table seems lifeless. Far worse than this, those parts of Oxford where the Group's influence was strongest have suffered a disastrous decline. The Montague Burton Professorship of International Relations, to which Professor Zimmern and later Professor Woodward brought such great talents, was given in 1948 to a middle-aged spinster, daughter of Sir James Headlam-Morley, with one published work to her credit. The Chichele Professorship of International Law and Diplomacy, held with distinction for twenty-five years by Professor James L. Briefly, was filled in 1947 by a common-law lawyer, a specialist in the law of real property, who, by his own confession, is largely ignorant of international law and whose sole published work, written with the collaboration of a specialist on equity, is a treatise on the Law of Mortgages. These appointments, which gave a shock to academic circles in the United States, do not allow an outside observer to feel any great optimism for the future either of the Milner Group or of the great institutions which it has influenced. It would seem that the great idealistic adventure which began with Toynbee and Milner in 1875 had slowly ground its way to a finish of bitterness and ashes.
The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden
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Re: The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Clivede
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Re: The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Clivede
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Appendix: A Tentative Roster of the Milner Group
The following lists are tentative in the sense that they are incomplete and erroneous. The errors are more likely in the attribution of persons to one circle of the Group rather than another, and are less likely in the attribution to the Group of persons who are not members at all. For the names given I have sufficient evidence to convince me that they are members of the Croup, although I would not in many cases feel competent to insist that the persons concerned knew that they were members of a secret group. The evidence on which this list is based is derived from documentary evidence, from private information, and from circumstantial evidence.
Persons are listed in each group on the basis of general impression rather than exact demarcation, because the distinction between the two is rather vague and varies from time to time. For example, I know for a fact that Sir Alfred Zimmern and Lord Cecil of Chelwood attended meetings of the inner circle in the period before 1920, but I have attributed them to the outer circle because this appears to be the more accurate designation for the long period since 1920.
Within each list I have placed the names of the various individuals in order of chronology and of importance. In some cases where I suspected a person of being a member without having any very convincing evidence, I have enclosed the name in brackets.
A. The Society of the Elect
Cecil John Rhodes
Nathan Rothschild, Baron Rothschild
Sir Harry Johnston
William T. Stead
Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher
Alfred Milner, Viscount Milner
B. F. Hawksley
Thomas Brassey, Lord Brassey
Edmund Garrett
[Sir Edward Cook]
Alfred Beit
Sir Abe Bailey
Albert Grey, Earl Grey
Archibald Primrose, Earl of Rosebery
Arthur James Balfour
Sir George R. Parkin
Philip Lyttelton Gell
Sir Henry Birchenough
Sir Reginald Sothern Holland
Arthur Lionel Smith
Herbert A. L. Fisher
William Waldegrave Palmer, Earl of Selborne
[Sir Alfred Lyttelton]
Sir Patrick Duncan
Robert Henry Brand, Baron Brand
Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian
Lionel Curtis
Geoffrey Dawson
Edward Grigg, Baron Altrincham
Jan C. Smuts
Leopold Amery
Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor
Nancy Astor, Lady Astor
B. The Association of Helpers
1 . The Inner Circle
Sir Patrick Duncan
Robert Henry Brand, Baron Brand
Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian
Lionel Curtis
William L. Hichens
Geoffrey Dawson
Edward Grigg, Baron Altrincham
Herbert A. L. Fisher
Leopold Amery
Richard Feetham
Hugh A. Wyndham
Sir Dougal Malcolm
Basil Williams
Basil Kellett Long
Sir Abe Bailey
Jan C. Smuts
Sir William Marris
James S. Meston
Baron Meston
Malcolm Hailey
Baron Hailey
Flora Shaw
Lady Lugard
Sir Reginald Coupland
Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor
Nancy Astor, Lady Astor
Maurice Hankey, Baron Hankey
Arnold J. Toynbee
Laurence F. Rushbrook Williams
Henry Vincent Hodson
Vincent Todd Harlow
2. The Outer Circle
John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir
Sir Fabian Ware
Sir Alfred Zimmern
Gilbert Murray
Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
Sir James W. Headlam-Morley
Frederick J. N. Thesiger, Viscount Chelmsford
Sir Valentine Chirol
Edward F. L. Wood, Earl of Halifax
[James] Arthur Salter
Sir Arthur H. D. R. Steel-Maitland
William G. A. Ormsby-Gore, Baron Harlech
Dame Edith Lyttelton, Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton
Frederick Lugard, Baron Lugard
Sir [Leander] Starr Jameson
Henry W. C. Davis
John A. Simon, Viscount Simon
Samuel J. G. Hoare, Viscount Templewood
Maurice P. A. Hankey, Baron Hankey
Wilson Harris
[Francis Clarke]
William G. S. Adams
[William K. Hancock]
Ernest L. Woodward
Sir Harold Butler
Kenneth N. Bell
Sir Donald B. Somervell
Sir Maurice L. Gwyer
Charles R. S. Harris
Sir Edward R. Peacock
Sir Cyril J. Radcliffe
John W. Wheeler-Bennett
Robert J. Stopford
Robert M. Barrington-Ward
[Kenneth C. Wheare]
Edward H. Carr
Malcolm MacDonald
Godfrey Elton, Baron Elton
Sir Neill Malcolm
Freeman Freeman-Thomas, Viscount Willingdon
Isaiah Berlin
Roger M. Makins
Sir Arthur Willert
Ivison S. Macadam
3. Members in other countries
a. Canada
Arthur J. Glazebrook
Sir George Parkin
Vincent Massey
George P. de T. Glazebrook
Percy Corbett [Sir Joseph Flavelle]
b. United States
George Louis Beer
Frank Aydelotte
Jerome Greene
[Clarence Steit]
c. South Africa
Jan C. Smuts
Sir Patrick Duncan
Sir Abe Bailey
Basil K. Long
Richard Feetham
[Sir James Rose-Innes]
d. Australia
Sir Thomas Bavin
Sir Frederic Eggleston
[Dudley D. Braham]
e. New Zealand
James Allen
William Downie Stewart
Arthur R. Atkinson
f. Germany
Helmuth James von Moltke
Adam von Trott zu Solz
The following lists are tentative in the sense that they are incomplete and erroneous. The errors are more likely in the attribution of persons to one circle of the Group rather than another, and are less likely in the attribution to the Group of persons who are not members at all. For the names given I have sufficient evidence to convince me that they are members of the Croup, although I would not in many cases feel competent to insist that the persons concerned knew that they were members of a secret group. The evidence on which this list is based is derived from documentary evidence, from private information, and from circumstantial evidence.
Persons are listed in each group on the basis of general impression rather than exact demarcation, because the distinction between the two is rather vague and varies from time to time. For example, I know for a fact that Sir Alfred Zimmern and Lord Cecil of Chelwood attended meetings of the inner circle in the period before 1920, but I have attributed them to the outer circle because this appears to be the more accurate designation for the long period since 1920.
Within each list I have placed the names of the various individuals in order of chronology and of importance. In some cases where I suspected a person of being a member without having any very convincing evidence, I have enclosed the name in brackets.
A. The Society of the Elect
Cecil John Rhodes
Nathan Rothschild, Baron Rothschild
Sir Harry Johnston
William T. Stead
Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher
Alfred Milner, Viscount Milner
B. F. Hawksley
Thomas Brassey, Lord Brassey
Edmund Garrett
[Sir Edward Cook]
Alfred Beit
Sir Abe Bailey
Albert Grey, Earl Grey
Archibald Primrose, Earl of Rosebery
Arthur James Balfour
Sir George R. Parkin
Philip Lyttelton Gell
Sir Henry Birchenough
Sir Reginald Sothern Holland
Arthur Lionel Smith
Herbert A. L. Fisher
William Waldegrave Palmer, Earl of Selborne
[Sir Alfred Lyttelton]
Sir Patrick Duncan
Robert Henry Brand, Baron Brand
Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian
Lionel Curtis
Geoffrey Dawson
Edward Grigg, Baron Altrincham
Jan C. Smuts
Leopold Amery
Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor
Nancy Astor, Lady Astor
B. The Association of Helpers
1 . The Inner Circle
Sir Patrick Duncan
Robert Henry Brand, Baron Brand
Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian
Lionel Curtis
William L. Hichens
Geoffrey Dawson
Edward Grigg, Baron Altrincham
Herbert A. L. Fisher
Leopold Amery
Richard Feetham
Hugh A. Wyndham
Sir Dougal Malcolm
Basil Williams
Basil Kellett Long
Sir Abe Bailey
Jan C. Smuts
Sir William Marris
James S. Meston
Baron Meston
Malcolm Hailey
Baron Hailey
Flora Shaw
Lady Lugard
Sir Reginald Coupland
Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor
Nancy Astor, Lady Astor
Maurice Hankey, Baron Hankey
Arnold J. Toynbee
Laurence F. Rushbrook Williams
Henry Vincent Hodson
Vincent Todd Harlow
2. The Outer Circle
John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir
Sir Fabian Ware
Sir Alfred Zimmern
Gilbert Murray
Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
Sir James W. Headlam-Morley
Frederick J. N. Thesiger, Viscount Chelmsford
Sir Valentine Chirol
Edward F. L. Wood, Earl of Halifax
[James] Arthur Salter
Sir Arthur H. D. R. Steel-Maitland
William G. A. Ormsby-Gore, Baron Harlech
Dame Edith Lyttelton, Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton
Frederick Lugard, Baron Lugard
Sir [Leander] Starr Jameson
Henry W. C. Davis
John A. Simon, Viscount Simon
Samuel J. G. Hoare, Viscount Templewood
Maurice P. A. Hankey, Baron Hankey
Wilson Harris
[Francis Clarke]
William G. S. Adams
[William K. Hancock]
Ernest L. Woodward
Sir Harold Butler
Kenneth N. Bell
Sir Donald B. Somervell
Sir Maurice L. Gwyer
Charles R. S. Harris
Sir Edward R. Peacock
Sir Cyril J. Radcliffe
John W. Wheeler-Bennett
Robert J. Stopford
Robert M. Barrington-Ward
[Kenneth C. Wheare]
Edward H. Carr
Malcolm MacDonald
Godfrey Elton, Baron Elton
Sir Neill Malcolm
Freeman Freeman-Thomas, Viscount Willingdon
Isaiah Berlin
Roger M. Makins
Sir Arthur Willert
Ivison S. Macadam
3. Members in other countries
a. Canada
Arthur J. Glazebrook
Sir George Parkin
Vincent Massey
George P. de T. Glazebrook
Percy Corbett [Sir Joseph Flavelle]
b. United States
George Louis Beer
Frank Aydelotte
Jerome Greene
[Clarence Steit]
c. South Africa
Jan C. Smuts
Sir Patrick Duncan
Sir Abe Bailey
Basil K. Long
Richard Feetham
[Sir James Rose-Innes]
d. Australia
Sir Thomas Bavin
Sir Frederic Eggleston
[Dudley D. Braham]
e. New Zealand
James Allen
William Downie Stewart
Arthur R. Atkinson
f. Germany
Helmuth James von Moltke
Adam von Trott zu Solz
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Re: The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Clivede
by admin » Tue Apr 30, 2019 2:32 am
Part 1 of 2
Notes:
Chapter 1
1 . The sources of this information and a more detailed examination of the organization and personnel of the Rhodes secret society will be found in Chapter 3 below.
2. On Parkin, see the biography (1929) started by Sir John Willison and finished by Parkin's son-in-law, William L. Grant. Also see the sketches of both Parkin and Milner in the Dictionary of National Biography. The debate in the Oxford Union which first brought Parkin to Milner's attention is mentioned in Herbert Asquith's (Lord Oxford and Asquith) Memories and Reflections (2 vols., Boston, 1928), 1, 26.
3. The ideas for social service work among the poor and certain other ideas held by Toynbee and Milner were derived from the teachings of John Ruskin, who first came to Oxford as a professor during their undergraduate days. The two young men became ardent disciples of Ruskin and were members of his road-building group in the summer of 1870. The standard biography of Ruskin was written by a protege of Milner's, Edward Cook. The same man edited the complete collection of Ruskin's works in thirty-eight volumes. See Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections (2 vols., Boston, 1928), 1, 48. Cook's sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was written by Asquith's intimate friend and biographer, J. A. Spender.
4. The quotation is from Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), I, 15. There exists no biography of Milner, and all of the works concerned with his career have been written by members of the Milner Group and conceal more than they reveal. The most important general sketches of his life are the sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography, the obituary in The Times (May 1925), and the obituary in The Round Table (June 1925, XV, 427-430). His own point of view must be sought in his speeches and essays. Of these, the chief collections are The Nation and the Empire (Boston, 1913) and Questions of the flour (London, 1923). Unfortunately, the speeches after 1913 and all the essays which appeared in periodicals are still uncollected. This neglect of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century is probably deliberate, part of the policy of secrecy practiced by the Milner Group.
Chapter 2
1. A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941), 54. Inasmuch as Lord Halifax assisted the author of this biography and gave to him previously unpublished material to insert in it, we are justified in considering this an "authorized" biography and giving its statements considerable weight. The author is aware of the existence of the Milner Group and attributes much of Lord Halifax's spectacular career to his connection with the Croup.
2. H. H. Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (2 vols., London, 1942-1943), II, 66.
3. C. Hobhouse, Oxford as It Was and as It Is Today (London, 1939), 18.
4. On the role of Charles Hardinge in foreign policy, see A. L. Kennedy, "Lord Hardinge of Penshurst," in The Quarterly Review (January 1945), CCLXXXIII, 97-104, and Charles Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, Old Diplomacy; Reminiscences (London, 1947). Although not mentioned again in this work, A. I.. Kennedy appears to be a member of the Milner Group.
5. Lord Ernie, Whippingham to Westminster (London, 1938), 248.
6. Lionel Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), 54.
7. Another exception was "Bron" Lucas (Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas and Dingwall), son of Auberon Herbert, the brother of Lord Carnavon. "Bron" went from Balliol to South Africa as a Times correspondent in the Boer War and lost a leg from overzealous devotion to the task. A close friend of John Buchan and Raymond Asquith, he became a Liberal M.P. through the latter's influence but had to go to the Upper 1 louse in 1905, when he inherited two titles from his mother's brother. He was subsequently private secretary to Haldane (1908), Under Secretary for War (1908-1911), Under Secretary for the Colonies (1911), Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Agriculture (1911-1914), and President of the Board of Agriculture (1914-1915). He thus became a member of the Cabinet while only thirty-eight years old. He resigned to join the Royal Flying Corps and was killed in 1916, about the same time as Raymond Asquith. Both of these, had they lived, would probably have become members of the Milner Group. Asquith was already a Fellow of All Souls (1901-1916). On "Bron" Lucas, see the autobiographies of Lords Asquith and Tweedsmuir and the article in the memorial volume to Balliol's dead in the First World War.
8. On these clubs, see Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections (2 vols., Boston, 1928), 1, 311-325.
9. The chief published references to the existence of the Milner Group from the pens of members will be found in the obituary notes on deceased members in The Round Table and in the sketches in the Dictionary of National Biography. In the former, see the notes on Milner, Hickens, Lord Lothian, A. J. Glazebrook, Sir Thomas Bavin, Sir Patrick Duncan, Sir Abe Bailey, etc. See also the references in the published works of Lionel Curtis, John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir), John Dove, etc. Quotations to this effect from John Buchan and from Lord Asquith will be found at the end of Chapter 3 below. The best published reference to the Milner Group is in M. S. Geen, The Making of the Union of South Africa (London, 1946), 150-152. The best account originating in the Group itself is in the article "Twenty-five Years" in The Round Table for September 1935, XV, 653- 659.
Chapter 3
1. This section is based on W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902); Sir Francis Wylie's three articles in the American Oxonian (April 1944), XXXI, 65-69; July 1944), XXXI, 129-138; and January 1945), XXXH, 1- 11; F. Aydelotte, The American Rhodes Scholars (Princeton, 1946); and the biographies and memoirs of the men mentioned.
2. No such claim is made by Sir Francis Wylie, from whose articles Dr. Aydelotte derived most of the material for his first chapter. Sir Francis merely mentions the secret society in connection with the early wills and then drops the whole subject.
3. W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 1 10-1 1 1. The statement of 1896 to Brett is in Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher(4 vols., London, 1934-1938), 1, 197.
4. Dr. Aydelotte quotes at length from a letter which Rhodes sent to Stead in 1891, but he does not quote the statements which Stead made about it when he published it in 1902. In this letter he spoke about the project of federal union with the United States and said, "The only feasible [way] to carry this idea out is a secret one (society) gradually absorbing the wealth of the world to be devoted to such an object." At the end of this document Stead wrote: "Mr. Rhodes has never to my knowledge said a word nor has he ever written a syllable, that justifies the suggestion that he surrendered the aspirations which were expressed in this letter of 1891. So far from this being the case, in the long discussions which took place between us in the last years of his life, he reaffirmed as emphatically as at first his unshaken conviction as to the dream — if you like to call it so — a vision, which had ever been the guiding star of his life." See W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 13-11.
5. Sir John Willison, Sir George Parkin (London, 1929), 234.
6. This paragraph and the two preceding it are from Sir Frederick Whyte, The Life of W. T Stead (2 vols., Boston 1925), 270-272 and 39.
7. See Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), 1, 149-150. It should be noted that the excision in the entry for 3 February marked by three points (...) was made by Lord Esher's son when he edited the journals for publication.
8. See F. Whyte, Life ofW. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), 199-212.
9. No mention of the secret society is to be found in either Sir Harry Johnston, The Story of My Life (London, 1923), or in Alex. Johnston, Life and Letters of Sir Harry Johnston (London, 1929). The former work does contain an account of Johnston's break with Rhodes on page 497. More details are on pages 145-148 of the later work, including a record of Rhodes's saying, "I will smash you Johnston, for this." Johnston was convinced that it was a result of this enmity that Milner rather than he was chosen to be High Commissioner of South Africa in 1897. See pages 338-339.
10. Rhodes's reason for eliminating him (given in the January 1901 codicil to his will) was "on account of the extraordinary eccentricity of Mr. Stead, though having always a great respect for him, but feeling the objects of my Will would be embarrassed by his views." Milner's reasons (given in the "Stead Memorial" number of The Review of Reviews, May 1912) were his "lack of balance," which was "his Achilles heel.' See also the letter of 12 April 1902 from Edmund Garrett to Stead, quoted below, from F. Whyte, The Life ofW. T Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), 211.
11. The quotation is from the sketch of Lord Esher in the Dictionary of National Biography. The other quotations from Brett are from The Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1934-1938).
12. E. T. Cook, Edmund Garrett (London, 1909), 158. The excision in this letter marked by three points (. . .) was made by Cook. Cook was a protege of Milner's, found in New College, invited to contribute to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881, and added to the staff as an editor in August 1883, when Milner was acting as editor-in-chief, during the absence of Morley and Stead. See F. Whyte, The Life ofW. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), I, 94. Cook remained close to Milner for many years. On 4 October 1899 Lord Esher wrote to his son a letter in which he said: "Cook is the Editor of the Daily News and is in close touch with Milner and his friends" — Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), I, 240.
13. F. Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), 211. The quotation in the next paragraph is from the same place.
14. As an example of this and an example of the way in which the secret society functioned in the early period, see the following passage from the Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), under the date 21 November 1892: "I went to London on Friday and called on Rhodes. He had asked me to do so.... Rhodes asked for the Government carriage of his telegraph poles and 200 Sikhs at Blantyre. Then he will make the telegraph. He would like a gunboat on Tanganyika. I stayed there to lunch. Then saw Rosebery. He was in good spirits." From Sir Harry Johnston's autobiography, it is clear that the 200 Sikhs were for him.
15. S. G. Millen, Rhodes (London, 1934), 341-342.
16. In the House of Commons, Maguire was a supporter of Parnell, acting on orders from Rhodes, who had given £10,000 to Parnell's cause in 1888. Rhodes's own explanation of why he supported Parnell is a typical Milner Group statement. He said that he gave the money "since in Mr. Parnell's cause.... I believe he's the key to the Federal System, on the basis of perfect Home Rule in every part of the Empire." This quotation is from S. G. Millin, Rhodes (London, 1934), 1 12, and is based on W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902).
17. The first quotation is from Edmund Garrett, "Milner and Rhodes," in The Empire and the Century (London, 1905), 478. According to The Times obituary of Milner, 14 May 1925, Rhodes repeated these sentiments in different words on his deathbed, 26 March 1902. The statement to Stead will be found in W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 108.
18. See Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers, 1897-1905 (2 vols., London, 1931- 1933), 1 1,412-413; the unpublished material is at New College, Oxford, in Milner Papers, XXXVHI, ii, 200.
Chapter 4
1. The obituary of Patrick Duncan in The Round Table (September 1943), XXXIII, 303-305, reads in part: "Duncan became the doyen of the band of brothers, Milner's young men, who were nicknamed . . . The Kindergarten,' then in the first flush of youthful enthusiasm. It is a fast ageing and dwindling band now; but it has played a part in the Union of South Africa colonies, and it is responsible for the foundation and conduct of The Round Table. For forty years and more, so far as the vicissitudes of life have allowed, it has kept together; and always, while looking up to Lord Milner and to his successor in South Africa, the late Lord Selborne, as its political Chief, has revered Patrick Duncan as the Captain of the band." According to R. H. Brand, ed., The Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), Duncan was coming to England to the meetings of the Group as late was 1932.
2. The above list of eighteen names does not contain all the members of the Kindergarten. A complete list would include: (1) Harry Wilson (Sir Harry after 1908), who was a "Seeley lecturer" with Parkin in the 1890s; was chief private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain in 1895-1897; was legal adviser to the Colonial Office and to Milner in 1897-1901; was Secretary and Colonial Secretary to the Orange River Colony in 1901- 1907; was a member of the Intercolonial Council and of the Railway Committee in 1903- 1907. (2) E. B. Sargant, who organized the school system of South Africa for Milner in 1900-1904 and was Director of Education for both the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in 1902-1904; he wrote a chapter for The Empire and the Century in 1905. (3) Gerard Craig Sellar, who died in 1929, and on whom no information is available. There was a Craig-Sellar Fellowship in his honor at Balliol in 1946. (4) Oscar Ferris Watkins, a Bible Clerk at All Souls at the end of the nineteenth century, received a MA. from this college in 1910; he was in the South African Constabulary in 1902-1904, was in the Transvaal Civil Service in 1904-1907; was in the East African Protectorate Service and the E.A. Civil Service from 1908, being a District Commissioner in 1914, Acting Chief Native Commissioner in 1920-1927, a member of the Legislative Council in 1920-1922, Deputy Chief Native Commissioner of Kenya in 1921-1927; he was Director of Military Labour under Smuts in German East Africa in 1914-1918. (5) Percy Girouard (later Sir Percy) was chairman of the Egyptian Railway Board in 1898-1899; was Director of Railways in the Boer War in 1899-1902; was Commissioner of Railways and Head of the Central South African Railways in 1902-1904; was High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria in 1907-1908 and Governor in 1908-1909; was Governor of the East African Protectorate in 1909-1912; was director of Armstrong, Whitworth and Company in 1912- 1915; and was Director General of Munitions Supply in 1914-1915. He was fired by Lloyd George for inefficiency in 1915.
3. Douglas Malcolm's sister in 1907 married Neill Malcolm (since 1919 Major General Sir Neill Malcolm), who was a regular army officer from 1889 to his retirement in 1924. He was on the British Military Mission to Berlin in 1919-1921; Commanding General in Malaya, 1921-1924; a founder of the RIIA, of which he was chairman from 1926 (succeeding Lord Meston) to 1935 (succeeded by Lord Astor). He was High Commissioner for German Refugees in 1936-1938, with R. M. Makins (member of All Souls and the Milner Group and later British Minister in Washington) as his chief British subordinate. He is president of the British North Borneo Company, of which Dougal Malcolm is vice-president. Ian Malcolm (Sir Ian since 1919), a brother of Neill Malcolm, was an attache at Berlin, Paris, and Petersburg in 1891-1896; and M.P. in 1895-1906 and again 1910-1919; assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury (1895-1900); parliamentary private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland (George Wyndham) in 1901-1903; Secretary to the Union Defence League, organized by Walter Long, in 1906-1910; a Red Cross officer in Europe and North America (1914-1917); on Balfour's mission to the United States in 1917; private secretary to Balfour during the Peace Conference (1919); and British representative on the Board of Directors of the Suez Canal Company. He wrote Walter Long's biography in the Dictionary of National Biography.
4. See W. B. Worsfold, The Reconstruction of the New Colonies under Lord Milner (2 vols., London, 1913), II, 207-222 and 302-419.
5. The last quotation is from Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), liii. The other are from The Problem of the Commonwealth (London, 1915), 18, and 200-219.
6. Fisher was one of the most important members of the Milner Group, a fact which would never be gathered from the recent biography written by David Ogg, Herbert Fisher, 1865-1940 (London, 1947). He was associated with members of the Group, or persons close to it all his life. At New College in the period 1884-1888, he was a student of W. L. Courtney, whose widow, Dame Janet Courtney, was later close to the Group. He became a Fellow of New College in 1888, along with Gilbert Murray, also a member of the Group. His pupils at New College included Curtis, Kerr, Brand, Malcolm, and Hichens in the first few years of teaching; the invitation to South Africa in 1908 came through Curtis, his articles on the trip were published in The Times. He sailed to India in 1913 with Herbert Baker of the Group (Rhodes's architect). He refused the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1918, so it was given to Amery's brother-in-law; he refused the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in December 1918, when Robert Cecil resigned. He played a certain role in drafting the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1919 and the Government of Ireland Bill of 1921, and piloted the latter through Commons. He refused the post of Ambassador to Washington in 1919. Nevertheless, he did not see eye to eye with the inner core of the Group on either religion or protection, since he was an atheist and a free-trader to the end. His book on Christian Science almost caused a break with some members of the Group.
7. H. H. Henson, Memoirs of Sir William Anson (Oxford, 1920), 212.
8. Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers, 1897-1905 (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), n, 501.
9. R. H. Brand, The Union of South Africa (Oxford, 1909), 39.
10. Smuts was frequently used by the Milner Group to enunciate its policies in public (as, for example, in his speeches of 15 May 1917 and 13 November 1934). The fact that he was speaking for the Milner Group was generally recognized by the upper classes in England, was largely ignored by the masses in England, and was virtually unknown to Americans. Lord Davies assumed this as beyond the need of proof in an article which he published in The Nineteenth Century in January 1935. He was attacking the Milner Group's belief that British defense could be based on the Dominions and the United States and especially on its efforts to reduce the League of Nations to a simple debating society. He pointed out the need for an international police force, then asked, "Will the Dominions and the United States volunteer as special constables? And, if they refuse, does it mean that Great Britain is precluded from doing so? The reply of The Round Table is 'yes,' and the most recent exposition of its policy is contained in the speech delivered by General Smuts at the dinner given in his honor by the Royal Institute of International Affairs on November 13" — The Nineteenth Century (January 1935), CXVII, 51.
Smuts's way in imperial affairs was much smoothed by the high opinion which Lord Esher held of him; see, for example, The Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), IV, 101, 224, and 254.
11. Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections 1852-1927 (2 vols., Boston, 1928), I, 213-214. Asquith was a member of the Cecil Bloc and of "The Souls." He was a lifelong friend of both Balfour and Milner. It was the former who persuaded Asquith to write his memoirs, after talking the matter over privately with Margot Asquith one evening while Asquith himself was at Grillions. When Asquith married Margot Tennant in 1894, the witnesses who signed the marriage certificates were A. J. Balfour, W. E. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Charles Tennant, H. J. Tennant, and R. B. Haldane. Asquith's friendship with Milner went back to their undergraduate days. In his autobiography Asquith wrote (pp. 210-21 1): "We sat together at the Scholar's table in Hall for three years. We then formed a close friendship, and were for many years on intimate terms and in almost constant contact with one another. ... At Oxford we both took an active part at the Union in upholding the unfashionable Liberal cause.... In my early married days [1877-1885] he used often to come to my house at Hampstead for a frugal Sunday supper when we talked over political and literary matters, for the most part in general agreement." For Milner's relationship with Margot Tennant before her marriage to Asquith in 1894, see her second fling at autobiography, More or Less about Myself (London, 1932). On 22 April 1908, W. T. Stead wrote to Lord Esher that Mrs. Asquith had three portraits over her bed: Rosebery, Balfour, and Milner. See The Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), 11, 304.
Chapter 5
1. The Times's obituary on Milner (14 May 1925), obviously written by a person who knew the situation well (probably either Dawson or Amery), said; "He would never in any circumstances have accepted office again.... That he always disliked it, assumed it with reluctance, and laid it down with infinite relief, is a fact about which in his case there was never the smallest affectation." It will be recalled that Milner had refused the Colonial Secretaryship in 1903; about six years later, according to The Times obituary, he refused a Unionist offer of a Cabinet post in the next Conservative government, unless the party would pledge itself to establish compulsory military training. This it would not do. It is worth recalling that another initiate, Lord Esher, shared Milner's fondness for compulsory military training, as well as his reluctance to hold public of flee.
2. E. Garrett, The Empire and the Century (London, 1905), 481. Eight years later in 1913, in the introduction to a collection of his speeches called The Nation and the Empire (Boston, 1913), Milner said almost the same thing. Milner's distaste for party politics was shared by Lord Esher and Lord Grey to such an extent as to become a chief motivating force in their lives. See H. Begbie, Albert, Fourth Earl Grey (London, 1918), especially p. 52, and The Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), passim.
3. Letter of Milner to Congdon, 23 November 1904, in Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), H, 506.
4. Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), I, 267 and 288; II, 505. Milner's antipathy for party politics was generally shared by the inner circle of the Milner Group. The future Lord Lothian, writing in The Round Table, August 1911, was very critical of party politics and used the same arguments against it as Milner. He wrote: "At any moment a party numbering among its numbers all the people best qualified to manage foreign affairs may be cast from office, for reasons which have nothing to do with their conduct of these matters. ... If the people of Great Britain manage to keep at the head of the great Imperial offices of State, men who will command the confidence of the Dominions, and who pursue steadfastly a . . . successful policy, and if the people of the Dominions are tolerant and far-sighted enough to accept such a policy as their own, the present arrangement may last. Does history give us any reason for expecting that the domestic party system will produce so great a combination of good fortune and good management?" (The Round Table, I, 414-418).
In the introduction to The Nation and the Empire, written in 1913, Milner expressed himself in a similar vein.
5. Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebery (2 vols., London, 1931), 615.
6. See John, Viscount Morley, Recollections (2 vols., New York, 1917), II.
7. The fact that a small "secret" group controlled the nominations for Chancellor of Oxford was widely recognized in Britain, but not frequently mentioned publicly. In May 1925 the Earl of Birkenhead wrote a letter to The Times to protest against this usurpation by a nonofficial group and was answered in The Times, by a letter which stated that, when the group was formed after the interruption of the First World War, he had been invited to join it but had never acknowledged the invitation! Milner's nomination was made by a group that met in New College, under the chairmanship of H. A. L. Fisher, on 5 May 1925. There were was about thirty present, including Fisher, Lord Astor, Lord Ernie, Steel-Maitland, Pember, Wilkinson, Brand, Lucas, M. G. Glazebrook, Sir Herbert Warren (classmate and friend of Milner's), Archbishop Davidson, Cyril Bailey, etc. The same group, according to Lord Halifax's biographer, nominated Lord Halifax to the Chancellorship in 1933.
8. The editors were assisted in the work of producing the two volumes by Margaret Toynbee. The influence of the Milner Group can be discerned in the list of acknowledgments in the preface to Weaver's volume. Among eighteen names listed may be found those of Cyril Bailey (Fellow of Balliol, 1902-1939, and member of the Ministry of Munitions, 1915-1918); C. R. M. F. Cruttwell (member of All Souls and the Round Table Group, Principal of Hertford College since 1930); Geoffrey Dawson, H. A. L. Fisher; and Ernest Swinton (Fellow of All Souls, 1925-1939). Apparently these persons decided what names should be included in the Dictionary.
Notes:
Chapter 1
1 . The sources of this information and a more detailed examination of the organization and personnel of the Rhodes secret society will be found in Chapter 3 below.
2. On Parkin, see the biography (1929) started by Sir John Willison and finished by Parkin's son-in-law, William L. Grant. Also see the sketches of both Parkin and Milner in the Dictionary of National Biography. The debate in the Oxford Union which first brought Parkin to Milner's attention is mentioned in Herbert Asquith's (Lord Oxford and Asquith) Memories and Reflections (2 vols., Boston, 1928), 1, 26.
3. The ideas for social service work among the poor and certain other ideas held by Toynbee and Milner were derived from the teachings of John Ruskin, who first came to Oxford as a professor during their undergraduate days. The two young men became ardent disciples of Ruskin and were members of his road-building group in the summer of 1870. The standard biography of Ruskin was written by a protege of Milner's, Edward Cook. The same man edited the complete collection of Ruskin's works in thirty-eight volumes. See Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections (2 vols., Boston, 1928), 1, 48. Cook's sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was written by Asquith's intimate friend and biographer, J. A. Spender.
4. The quotation is from Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), I, 15. There exists no biography of Milner, and all of the works concerned with his career have been written by members of the Milner Group and conceal more than they reveal. The most important general sketches of his life are the sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography, the obituary in The Times (May 1925), and the obituary in The Round Table (June 1925, XV, 427-430). His own point of view must be sought in his speeches and essays. Of these, the chief collections are The Nation and the Empire (Boston, 1913) and Questions of the flour (London, 1923). Unfortunately, the speeches after 1913 and all the essays which appeared in periodicals are still uncollected. This neglect of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century is probably deliberate, part of the policy of secrecy practiced by the Milner Group.
Chapter 2
1. A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941), 54. Inasmuch as Lord Halifax assisted the author of this biography and gave to him previously unpublished material to insert in it, we are justified in considering this an "authorized" biography and giving its statements considerable weight. The author is aware of the existence of the Milner Group and attributes much of Lord Halifax's spectacular career to his connection with the Croup.
2. H. H. Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (2 vols., London, 1942-1943), II, 66.
3. C. Hobhouse, Oxford as It Was and as It Is Today (London, 1939), 18.
4. On the role of Charles Hardinge in foreign policy, see A. L. Kennedy, "Lord Hardinge of Penshurst," in The Quarterly Review (January 1945), CCLXXXIII, 97-104, and Charles Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, Old Diplomacy; Reminiscences (London, 1947). Although not mentioned again in this work, A. I.. Kennedy appears to be a member of the Milner Group.
5. Lord Ernie, Whippingham to Westminster (London, 1938), 248.
6. Lionel Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), 54.
7. Another exception was "Bron" Lucas (Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas and Dingwall), son of Auberon Herbert, the brother of Lord Carnavon. "Bron" went from Balliol to South Africa as a Times correspondent in the Boer War and lost a leg from overzealous devotion to the task. A close friend of John Buchan and Raymond Asquith, he became a Liberal M.P. through the latter's influence but had to go to the Upper 1 louse in 1905, when he inherited two titles from his mother's brother. He was subsequently private secretary to Haldane (1908), Under Secretary for War (1908-1911), Under Secretary for the Colonies (1911), Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Agriculture (1911-1914), and President of the Board of Agriculture (1914-1915). He thus became a member of the Cabinet while only thirty-eight years old. He resigned to join the Royal Flying Corps and was killed in 1916, about the same time as Raymond Asquith. Both of these, had they lived, would probably have become members of the Milner Group. Asquith was already a Fellow of All Souls (1901-1916). On "Bron" Lucas, see the autobiographies of Lords Asquith and Tweedsmuir and the article in the memorial volume to Balliol's dead in the First World War.
8. On these clubs, see Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections (2 vols., Boston, 1928), 1, 311-325.
9. The chief published references to the existence of the Milner Group from the pens of members will be found in the obituary notes on deceased members in The Round Table and in the sketches in the Dictionary of National Biography. In the former, see the notes on Milner, Hickens, Lord Lothian, A. J. Glazebrook, Sir Thomas Bavin, Sir Patrick Duncan, Sir Abe Bailey, etc. See also the references in the published works of Lionel Curtis, John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir), John Dove, etc. Quotations to this effect from John Buchan and from Lord Asquith will be found at the end of Chapter 3 below. The best published reference to the Milner Group is in M. S. Geen, The Making of the Union of South Africa (London, 1946), 150-152. The best account originating in the Group itself is in the article "Twenty-five Years" in The Round Table for September 1935, XV, 653- 659.
Chapter 3
1. This section is based on W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902); Sir Francis Wylie's three articles in the American Oxonian (April 1944), XXXI, 65-69; July 1944), XXXI, 129-138; and January 1945), XXXH, 1- 11; F. Aydelotte, The American Rhodes Scholars (Princeton, 1946); and the biographies and memoirs of the men mentioned.
2. No such claim is made by Sir Francis Wylie, from whose articles Dr. Aydelotte derived most of the material for his first chapter. Sir Francis merely mentions the secret society in connection with the early wills and then drops the whole subject.
3. W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 1 10-1 1 1. The statement of 1896 to Brett is in Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher(4 vols., London, 1934-1938), 1, 197.
4. Dr. Aydelotte quotes at length from a letter which Rhodes sent to Stead in 1891, but he does not quote the statements which Stead made about it when he published it in 1902. In this letter he spoke about the project of federal union with the United States and said, "The only feasible [way] to carry this idea out is a secret one (society) gradually absorbing the wealth of the world to be devoted to such an object." At the end of this document Stead wrote: "Mr. Rhodes has never to my knowledge said a word nor has he ever written a syllable, that justifies the suggestion that he surrendered the aspirations which were expressed in this letter of 1891. So far from this being the case, in the long discussions which took place between us in the last years of his life, he reaffirmed as emphatically as at first his unshaken conviction as to the dream — if you like to call it so — a vision, which had ever been the guiding star of his life." See W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 13-11.
5. Sir John Willison, Sir George Parkin (London, 1929), 234.
6. This paragraph and the two preceding it are from Sir Frederick Whyte, The Life of W. T Stead (2 vols., Boston 1925), 270-272 and 39.
7. See Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), 1, 149-150. It should be noted that the excision in the entry for 3 February marked by three points (...) was made by Lord Esher's son when he edited the journals for publication.
8. See F. Whyte, Life ofW. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), 199-212.
9. No mention of the secret society is to be found in either Sir Harry Johnston, The Story of My Life (London, 1923), or in Alex. Johnston, Life and Letters of Sir Harry Johnston (London, 1929). The former work does contain an account of Johnston's break with Rhodes on page 497. More details are on pages 145-148 of the later work, including a record of Rhodes's saying, "I will smash you Johnston, for this." Johnston was convinced that it was a result of this enmity that Milner rather than he was chosen to be High Commissioner of South Africa in 1897. See pages 338-339.
10. Rhodes's reason for eliminating him (given in the January 1901 codicil to his will) was "on account of the extraordinary eccentricity of Mr. Stead, though having always a great respect for him, but feeling the objects of my Will would be embarrassed by his views." Milner's reasons (given in the "Stead Memorial" number of The Review of Reviews, May 1912) were his "lack of balance," which was "his Achilles heel.' See also the letter of 12 April 1902 from Edmund Garrett to Stead, quoted below, from F. Whyte, The Life ofW. T Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), 211.
11. The quotation is from the sketch of Lord Esher in the Dictionary of National Biography. The other quotations from Brett are from The Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1934-1938).
12. E. T. Cook, Edmund Garrett (London, 1909), 158. The excision in this letter marked by three points (. . .) was made by Cook. Cook was a protege of Milner's, found in New College, invited to contribute to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881, and added to the staff as an editor in August 1883, when Milner was acting as editor-in-chief, during the absence of Morley and Stead. See F. Whyte, The Life ofW. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), I, 94. Cook remained close to Milner for many years. On 4 October 1899 Lord Esher wrote to his son a letter in which he said: "Cook is the Editor of the Daily News and is in close touch with Milner and his friends" — Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), I, 240.
13. F. Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), 211. The quotation in the next paragraph is from the same place.
14. As an example of this and an example of the way in which the secret society functioned in the early period, see the following passage from the Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), under the date 21 November 1892: "I went to London on Friday and called on Rhodes. He had asked me to do so.... Rhodes asked for the Government carriage of his telegraph poles and 200 Sikhs at Blantyre. Then he will make the telegraph. He would like a gunboat on Tanganyika. I stayed there to lunch. Then saw Rosebery. He was in good spirits." From Sir Harry Johnston's autobiography, it is clear that the 200 Sikhs were for him.
15. S. G. Millen, Rhodes (London, 1934), 341-342.
16. In the House of Commons, Maguire was a supporter of Parnell, acting on orders from Rhodes, who had given £10,000 to Parnell's cause in 1888. Rhodes's own explanation of why he supported Parnell is a typical Milner Group statement. He said that he gave the money "since in Mr. Parnell's cause.... I believe he's the key to the Federal System, on the basis of perfect Home Rule in every part of the Empire." This quotation is from S. G. Millin, Rhodes (London, 1934), 1 12, and is based on W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902).
17. The first quotation is from Edmund Garrett, "Milner and Rhodes," in The Empire and the Century (London, 1905), 478. According to The Times obituary of Milner, 14 May 1925, Rhodes repeated these sentiments in different words on his deathbed, 26 March 1902. The statement to Stead will be found in W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 108.
18. See Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers, 1897-1905 (2 vols., London, 1931- 1933), 1 1,412-413; the unpublished material is at New College, Oxford, in Milner Papers, XXXVHI, ii, 200.
Chapter 4
1. The obituary of Patrick Duncan in The Round Table (September 1943), XXXIII, 303-305, reads in part: "Duncan became the doyen of the band of brothers, Milner's young men, who were nicknamed . . . The Kindergarten,' then in the first flush of youthful enthusiasm. It is a fast ageing and dwindling band now; but it has played a part in the Union of South Africa colonies, and it is responsible for the foundation and conduct of The Round Table. For forty years and more, so far as the vicissitudes of life have allowed, it has kept together; and always, while looking up to Lord Milner and to his successor in South Africa, the late Lord Selborne, as its political Chief, has revered Patrick Duncan as the Captain of the band." According to R. H. Brand, ed., The Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), Duncan was coming to England to the meetings of the Group as late was 1932.
2. The above list of eighteen names does not contain all the members of the Kindergarten. A complete list would include: (1) Harry Wilson (Sir Harry after 1908), who was a "Seeley lecturer" with Parkin in the 1890s; was chief private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain in 1895-1897; was legal adviser to the Colonial Office and to Milner in 1897-1901; was Secretary and Colonial Secretary to the Orange River Colony in 1901- 1907; was a member of the Intercolonial Council and of the Railway Committee in 1903- 1907. (2) E. B. Sargant, who organized the school system of South Africa for Milner in 1900-1904 and was Director of Education for both the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in 1902-1904; he wrote a chapter for The Empire and the Century in 1905. (3) Gerard Craig Sellar, who died in 1929, and on whom no information is available. There was a Craig-Sellar Fellowship in his honor at Balliol in 1946. (4) Oscar Ferris Watkins, a Bible Clerk at All Souls at the end of the nineteenth century, received a MA. from this college in 1910; he was in the South African Constabulary in 1902-1904, was in the Transvaal Civil Service in 1904-1907; was in the East African Protectorate Service and the E.A. Civil Service from 1908, being a District Commissioner in 1914, Acting Chief Native Commissioner in 1920-1927, a member of the Legislative Council in 1920-1922, Deputy Chief Native Commissioner of Kenya in 1921-1927; he was Director of Military Labour under Smuts in German East Africa in 1914-1918. (5) Percy Girouard (later Sir Percy) was chairman of the Egyptian Railway Board in 1898-1899; was Director of Railways in the Boer War in 1899-1902; was Commissioner of Railways and Head of the Central South African Railways in 1902-1904; was High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria in 1907-1908 and Governor in 1908-1909; was Governor of the East African Protectorate in 1909-1912; was director of Armstrong, Whitworth and Company in 1912- 1915; and was Director General of Munitions Supply in 1914-1915. He was fired by Lloyd George for inefficiency in 1915.
3. Douglas Malcolm's sister in 1907 married Neill Malcolm (since 1919 Major General Sir Neill Malcolm), who was a regular army officer from 1889 to his retirement in 1924. He was on the British Military Mission to Berlin in 1919-1921; Commanding General in Malaya, 1921-1924; a founder of the RIIA, of which he was chairman from 1926 (succeeding Lord Meston) to 1935 (succeeded by Lord Astor). He was High Commissioner for German Refugees in 1936-1938, with R. M. Makins (member of All Souls and the Milner Group and later British Minister in Washington) as his chief British subordinate. He is president of the British North Borneo Company, of which Dougal Malcolm is vice-president. Ian Malcolm (Sir Ian since 1919), a brother of Neill Malcolm, was an attache at Berlin, Paris, and Petersburg in 1891-1896; and M.P. in 1895-1906 and again 1910-1919; assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury (1895-1900); parliamentary private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland (George Wyndham) in 1901-1903; Secretary to the Union Defence League, organized by Walter Long, in 1906-1910; a Red Cross officer in Europe and North America (1914-1917); on Balfour's mission to the United States in 1917; private secretary to Balfour during the Peace Conference (1919); and British representative on the Board of Directors of the Suez Canal Company. He wrote Walter Long's biography in the Dictionary of National Biography.
4. See W. B. Worsfold, The Reconstruction of the New Colonies under Lord Milner (2 vols., London, 1913), II, 207-222 and 302-419.
5. The last quotation is from Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), liii. The other are from The Problem of the Commonwealth (London, 1915), 18, and 200-219.
6. Fisher was one of the most important members of the Milner Group, a fact which would never be gathered from the recent biography written by David Ogg, Herbert Fisher, 1865-1940 (London, 1947). He was associated with members of the Group, or persons close to it all his life. At New College in the period 1884-1888, he was a student of W. L. Courtney, whose widow, Dame Janet Courtney, was later close to the Group. He became a Fellow of New College in 1888, along with Gilbert Murray, also a member of the Group. His pupils at New College included Curtis, Kerr, Brand, Malcolm, and Hichens in the first few years of teaching; the invitation to South Africa in 1908 came through Curtis, his articles on the trip were published in The Times. He sailed to India in 1913 with Herbert Baker of the Group (Rhodes's architect). He refused the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1918, so it was given to Amery's brother-in-law; he refused the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in December 1918, when Robert Cecil resigned. He played a certain role in drafting the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1919 and the Government of Ireland Bill of 1921, and piloted the latter through Commons. He refused the post of Ambassador to Washington in 1919. Nevertheless, he did not see eye to eye with the inner core of the Group on either religion or protection, since he was an atheist and a free-trader to the end. His book on Christian Science almost caused a break with some members of the Group.
7. H. H. Henson, Memoirs of Sir William Anson (Oxford, 1920), 212.
8. Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers, 1897-1905 (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), n, 501.
9. R. H. Brand, The Union of South Africa (Oxford, 1909), 39.
10. Smuts was frequently used by the Milner Group to enunciate its policies in public (as, for example, in his speeches of 15 May 1917 and 13 November 1934). The fact that he was speaking for the Milner Group was generally recognized by the upper classes in England, was largely ignored by the masses in England, and was virtually unknown to Americans. Lord Davies assumed this as beyond the need of proof in an article which he published in The Nineteenth Century in January 1935. He was attacking the Milner Group's belief that British defense could be based on the Dominions and the United States and especially on its efforts to reduce the League of Nations to a simple debating society. He pointed out the need for an international police force, then asked, "Will the Dominions and the United States volunteer as special constables? And, if they refuse, does it mean that Great Britain is precluded from doing so? The reply of The Round Table is 'yes,' and the most recent exposition of its policy is contained in the speech delivered by General Smuts at the dinner given in his honor by the Royal Institute of International Affairs on November 13" — The Nineteenth Century (January 1935), CXVII, 51.
Smuts's way in imperial affairs was much smoothed by the high opinion which Lord Esher held of him; see, for example, The Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), IV, 101, 224, and 254.
11. Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections 1852-1927 (2 vols., Boston, 1928), I, 213-214. Asquith was a member of the Cecil Bloc and of "The Souls." He was a lifelong friend of both Balfour and Milner. It was the former who persuaded Asquith to write his memoirs, after talking the matter over privately with Margot Asquith one evening while Asquith himself was at Grillions. When Asquith married Margot Tennant in 1894, the witnesses who signed the marriage certificates were A. J. Balfour, W. E. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Charles Tennant, H. J. Tennant, and R. B. Haldane. Asquith's friendship with Milner went back to their undergraduate days. In his autobiography Asquith wrote (pp. 210-21 1): "We sat together at the Scholar's table in Hall for three years. We then formed a close friendship, and were for many years on intimate terms and in almost constant contact with one another. ... At Oxford we both took an active part at the Union in upholding the unfashionable Liberal cause.... In my early married days [1877-1885] he used often to come to my house at Hampstead for a frugal Sunday supper when we talked over political and literary matters, for the most part in general agreement." For Milner's relationship with Margot Tennant before her marriage to Asquith in 1894, see her second fling at autobiography, More or Less about Myself (London, 1932). On 22 April 1908, W. T. Stead wrote to Lord Esher that Mrs. Asquith had three portraits over her bed: Rosebery, Balfour, and Milner. See The Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), 11, 304.
Chapter 5
1. The Times's obituary on Milner (14 May 1925), obviously written by a person who knew the situation well (probably either Dawson or Amery), said; "He would never in any circumstances have accepted office again.... That he always disliked it, assumed it with reluctance, and laid it down with infinite relief, is a fact about which in his case there was never the smallest affectation." It will be recalled that Milner had refused the Colonial Secretaryship in 1903; about six years later, according to The Times obituary, he refused a Unionist offer of a Cabinet post in the next Conservative government, unless the party would pledge itself to establish compulsory military training. This it would not do. It is worth recalling that another initiate, Lord Esher, shared Milner's fondness for compulsory military training, as well as his reluctance to hold public of flee.
2. E. Garrett, The Empire and the Century (London, 1905), 481. Eight years later in 1913, in the introduction to a collection of his speeches called The Nation and the Empire (Boston, 1913), Milner said almost the same thing. Milner's distaste for party politics was shared by Lord Esher and Lord Grey to such an extent as to become a chief motivating force in their lives. See H. Begbie, Albert, Fourth Earl Grey (London, 1918), especially p. 52, and The Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), passim.
3. Letter of Milner to Congdon, 23 November 1904, in Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), H, 506.
4. Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), I, 267 and 288; II, 505. Milner's antipathy for party politics was generally shared by the inner circle of the Milner Group. The future Lord Lothian, writing in The Round Table, August 1911, was very critical of party politics and used the same arguments against it as Milner. He wrote: "At any moment a party numbering among its numbers all the people best qualified to manage foreign affairs may be cast from office, for reasons which have nothing to do with their conduct of these matters. ... If the people of Great Britain manage to keep at the head of the great Imperial offices of State, men who will command the confidence of the Dominions, and who pursue steadfastly a . . . successful policy, and if the people of the Dominions are tolerant and far-sighted enough to accept such a policy as their own, the present arrangement may last. Does history give us any reason for expecting that the domestic party system will produce so great a combination of good fortune and good management?" (The Round Table, I, 414-418).
In the introduction to The Nation and the Empire, written in 1913, Milner expressed himself in a similar vein.
5. Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebery (2 vols., London, 1931), 615.
6. See John, Viscount Morley, Recollections (2 vols., New York, 1917), II.
7. The fact that a small "secret" group controlled the nominations for Chancellor of Oxford was widely recognized in Britain, but not frequently mentioned publicly. In May 1925 the Earl of Birkenhead wrote a letter to The Times to protest against this usurpation by a nonofficial group and was answered in The Times, by a letter which stated that, when the group was formed after the interruption of the First World War, he had been invited to join it but had never acknowledged the invitation! Milner's nomination was made by a group that met in New College, under the chairmanship of H. A. L. Fisher, on 5 May 1925. There were was about thirty present, including Fisher, Lord Astor, Lord Ernie, Steel-Maitland, Pember, Wilkinson, Brand, Lucas, M. G. Glazebrook, Sir Herbert Warren (classmate and friend of Milner's), Archbishop Davidson, Cyril Bailey, etc. The same group, according to Lord Halifax's biographer, nominated Lord Halifax to the Chancellorship in 1933.
8. The editors were assisted in the work of producing the two volumes by Margaret Toynbee. The influence of the Milner Group can be discerned in the list of acknowledgments in the preface to Weaver's volume. Among eighteen names listed may be found those of Cyril Bailey (Fellow of Balliol, 1902-1939, and member of the Ministry of Munitions, 1915-1918); C. R. M. F. Cruttwell (member of All Souls and the Round Table Group, Principal of Hertford College since 1930); Geoffrey Dawson, H. A. L. Fisher; and Ernest Swinton (Fellow of All Souls, 1925-1939). Apparently these persons decided what names should be included in the Dictionary.
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Re: The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Clivede
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Part 2 of 2
Chapter 6
1 . The Milner Group's control over these lectures appears as much from the list of presiding officers as from the list of lecturers, thus:
2. Buckle came to The Times staff in 1880 because of his All Souls connection, being recommended by Sir William Anson, according to the official History of The Times. He was apparently selected to be the future editor from the beginning, since he was given a specially created position as "confidential assistant" to the editor, at a salary "decidedly higher than an Oxford graduate with a good degree could reasonably hope to gain in a few years in any of the regular professions." See The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), II, 529. Buckle may have been the link between Lord Salisbury and The Times, since they could easily meet at All Souls. Obviously The History of the Times, which devotes a full volume of 862 pages to the period of Buckle's editorship, does not tell the full story on Buckle, since he rarely appears on the scene as an actor and would seem, from the History, to have been ignorant of most of what was happening in his offices (the Rhodes-Jameson connection, for example). This is difficult to believe.
The History of The Times is unsatisfactory on other grounds as well. For example, it is not possible from this work to construct a complete record of who held various staff positions. We are told, for example, that Flora Shaw became head of the Colonial Department in 1890, but that ends that department as far as the volume is concerned. There is considerable material on Miss Shaw, especially in the chapters on the Transvaal, but we never find out w ho was her successor, or when she left the staff, or if (as appears likely) the Colonial Department was a creation for her occupancy only and did not survive her (undated) withdrawal from the staff; similarly the exact dates and positions of men like Amery and Grigg are not clear.
3. The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), III, 755.
4. There were others, but they are not of primary, or even secondary importance in the Milner Croup. We might mention Aubrey L. Kennedy (son of Sir John Kennedy of the diplomatic service), who was on The Times staff from 1910 to 1942, in military intelligence in 1914-1919, diplomatic correspondent for the BBC in 1942-1945, and an influential member of Chatham House since 1919.
5. E. Moberly Bell, Flora Shaw (London, 1947), 115.
6. At the suggestion of the British Foreign Office, copies of these articles were circulated in America and in Europe. See E. Moberly Bell, Flora Shaw (London, 1947) 228.
7. The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), 111, 212, 214.
8. All quotations are from The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), III, chapters 7 and 9.
9. See E. T. Cook, Edmund Garrett (London, 1909), 118-119. The difference of opinion between Stead and the others can be traced in F. Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), Ch. 21.
The failure of the plotters in Johannesburg to revolt so haunted the plotters elsewhere that they salved their wounds by fantasy. Stead wrote this fantasy for The Review of Reviews annual of January 1897, and consulted with Garrett, who had similar plans for the Christmas 1896 number of the Cape Times. In Stead's story, the Jameson fiasco was to be turned into a smashing success by a heroic South African editor, who, when all appeared lost, would rush to Johannesburg, stir up the revolt, and save the day. Garrett, who was to be the original model for the hero, wrote back: 'A suggestion which will help to keep us distinct, give you a much grander theme, and do something for C.J. R. which no one has yet dared — I went nearer to 'Cecil Rhodes' Dream' but that was a hint only: viz. Make world see what he was driving at and what would have come if all had come off and if Johannesburg had played up.... As to making me the hero. No.... But he must be not only me but you also, and A. Milner, and a few more rolled into one, and he must do what I dreamed of doing but time and space prevented." For the name of this hero Garrett suggested combining the three names into 'Milner Garsted" or "Milstead." Ultimately, Stead made the hero a woman. The new model was probably Flora Shawl The story appeared with the title "The History of a Mystery." See F. Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead, 94-95.
10. Even after the view of the majority prevailed, Stead refused to yield and published his version of a proper defense in The Scandal of the South Africa Committee (London, 1899). It was Stead's belief that preparation for"a raid" was a patriotic act which, if confessed, would have won public acclaim rather than condemnation.
11. On this see Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher, (4 vols., London, 1938N, 1, 196-202.
12. The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), 111, 244. It is clear from Miss Moberly Bell's biography of Flora Shaw (183-188) that Buckle knew this fact at least by 24 May 1897, although Miss Shaw had previously written him a letter stating explicit!) (probably for the record) that she had been acting without either Buckle's or Bell's knowledge. The night before Miss Shaw testified before the Select Committee, Buckle sent her a detailed letter of instruction on how to answer the committee's questions.
13. W. S. Blunt, My Diaries (London, 1932), 226.
14. See The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), 111, 315-316.
Chapter 7
1. L. Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), 41.
There can be no doubt that the original inspiration for the Round Table movement was to be found in anti-German feeling. In fact, there are some indications that this was the primary motive and that the stated purpose of working for imperial federation was, to some extent at least, a mask. The Round Table, in 1940, in its obituary of Abe Bailey (September 1940, XXX, 743-746) attributes its foundation to this cause as follows: "German ambitions to destroy and supplant the British Commonwealth were manifest to those who had eyes to see.... [These asked] 'Can not all the Dominions he brought to realize the common danger that confronts them as much as it confronts Great Britain and think out in mutual discussion the means of uniting all the force and resolution of the Empire in its defense?' To the solution of this question the founders of the Closer Union Societies resolved to apply a similar procedure. Round Table Groups were established in all the British Dominions to study the problem." A similar cause for the founding appeared in The Round Table as recently as the issue of September 1948.
2. The original leader of the Round Table Groups in New Zealand was apparently James Allen (Sir James after 1917), who had been educated in England, at Clifton School and Cambridge University, and was an M. P. in New Zealand from 1887 to 1920. He was Minister of Defense (1912-1920), Minister of Finance and Education (1912-1915), and Minister of Finance (1919-1920), before he became in 1920, New Zealand's High Commissioner in London. He was a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
In the Round Table Group for New Zealand, Allen was soon supplemented and eventually succeeded by William Downie-Stewart as the most important member. Stewart was at the time Mayor of Dunedin (1913) but soon began a twenty-one-year period as an M.P. (1914-1935). He was also Minister of Customs (1921-1928); Minister of Internal Affairs (1921-1924); Minister of Industries and Commerce (1923-1926); Attorney General (1926); Minister of Finance (1926-1928, 1931-1933); Acting Prime Minister (1926); New Zealand delegate to the Ottawa Conference (1932); Vice- Chancellor of Otago University; prominent businessman, and president of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs (1935- ). According to Dove's letters, he attended a Milner Group discussion meeting at Lord Lothian's country house in October 1932.
3. The chief leaders in Australia were Thomas Bavin (Sir Thomas after 1933) and Frederic W. Eggleston (Sir Frederic since 1941). The former, who died in 1941 (see obituary in The Round Table for December 1941), was a barrister in New South Wales from 1897, Professor of Law and Modern History at the University of Tasmania (1900- 1901); private secretary to the first Prime Minister of Australia, Sir Edmund Barton, in 1901-1904; Secretary and Chief Law Officer of Australia in 1907; It. commander in naval intelligence in 1916-1918; an Australian M.P. in 1919-1935; held many cabinet posts in New South Wales from 1922 to 1930, ending as Premier (1927-1930). He finished his career as a judge of the Supreme Court in 1935-1941. He was one of the original members of the Round Table Group in Australia, a regular contributor to The Round Table, and an important member of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Eggleston was a barrister from 1897; a member, correspondent, and chief agent in Australia for The Round Table from 1911; a member of the Legislative Assembly of Australia, (1920-1927); Minister for Railways, (1924-1926); chairman of the Commonwealth Grants Commission, (1934-1941); Minister of China (1941-1944) and to the United States (1944-1946). He was one of the founders and chief officers of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and its representative on the council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.
4. Glazebrook, although virtually unknown, was a very important figure in Canadian life, especially in financial and imperialist circles, up to his death in 1940. For many years he had a practical monopoly in foreign exchange transactions in Toronto, through his firm, Glazebrook and Cronyn (founded 1900). Like most members of the Milner Group, he was interested in adult education, workers' education, and university management. He promoted all of these in Toronto, lecturing himself to the Workers' Educational Association, and at the University of Toronto where he was assistant Professor of Banking and Finance (1926-1937). He was the chief adviser of leading bankers of Canada, and of London and New York bankers on Canadian matters. The Round Table says of him: "Through his friendship with Lord Milner and others he had at one time a wide acquaintance among the prominent figures in British public life, and it is well-known to his intimates that on numerous occasions British ministers, anxious to secure reliable information about certain Canadian affairs through unofficial channels, had recourse of Glazebrook.... By precept and example he exercised an immense influence for good upon the characters and outlook of a number of young Canadians who had the privilege of his society and knew him as 'The Sage.' Some of them, who have come to high place in the life of the Dominion, will not be slow to acknowledge the value of the inspiration and enlightenment which they derived from him. Continually he preached the doctrine to his young friends that it was their duty, if fortune had placed them in comfortable circumstances, to give some of their time to the intelligent study of public affairs and to the service of the community, and he awakened in not a few minds for the first time the idea that there were better goals in life than the making of money. It is true that the Round Table Groups which he organized with such enthusiasm have now faded into oblivion, but many of their members did not lose the zest for an intelligent study of politics which Glazebrook had implanted in them, and after the last war they proved keen supporters of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs as an agency for continuing the political education which Glazebrook had begun."
5. That Curtis consulted with Lord Chelmsford on the planned reforms before Lord Chelmsford went to India in 1916 was revealed in the House of Lords by Lord Crewe on 12 December 1919, and by Curtis in his book Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), xxvii.
6. Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), 74.
7. See R. H. Brand, ed., Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), 115-116.
8. See R. H. Brand, ed., Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), 326, 340.
9. Some of Milner's Canadian speeches in 1908 and in 1912 will be found in The Nation and the Empire (Boston, 1913). Kerr's speech at Toronto on 30 July 1912 was published by Glazebrook in June 1917 as an aid to the war effort. It bore on the cover the inscription "The Round Table in Canada." Curtis's speech, so far as I can determine, is unpublished.
10. See R. L. Schuyler, "The Rise of Anti-Imperialism in England," in The Political Science Quarterly (September 1928 and December 1921); O. D. Skelton, Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Gait (Toronto, 1920),440; and C. A. Bodelson, Studies in Mid- Victorian Imperialism (Copenhagen, 1924), 104.
11. All of these papers will be found in The Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, VI, 36-85; XII, 346-391; and XI, 90-132.
12. The ideas expressed by Lionel Curtis were really Milner's ideas. This was publicly admitted by Milner in a speech before a conference of British and Dominion parliamentarians called together by the Empire Parliamentary Association, 28 July 1916. At this meeting "Milner expressed complete agreement with the general argument of Mr. Curtis, making lengthy quotations from his book, and also accepted the main lines of his plan for Imperial Federation. The resulting discussion showed that not a single Dominion Member present agreed either with Mr. Curtis or Lord Milner." H. D. Hall, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1920), 166. The whole argument of Curtis's book was expressed briefly by Milner in 1913 in the Introduction to The Nation and the Empire.
13. Milner's two letters were in Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), I, 159-160 and 267; On Edward Wood's role, see A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941), 88-95. The project for devolution on a geographic basis for political matters and on a functional basis for economic matters was advocated by The Round Table in an article entitled "Some problems in democracy and reconstruction" in the issue of September 1917. The former type was accepted by Curtis as a method for solving the Irish problem and as a method which might well have been used in solving the Scottish problem in 1707. He wrote: "The continued existence in Edinburgh and London of provincial executives and legislatures, entrusted respectively with interests which were strictly Scottish and strictly English, was not incompatible with the policy of merging Scots and Englishmen in a common state. The possibility of distinguishing local from general interests had not as yet been realized." Again, he wrote: "If ever it should prove expedient to unburden the Parliament of the United Kingdom by delegating to the inhabitants of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales the management of their own provincial affairs and the condition of Ireland should prove no bar to such a measure, the Irish problem will once for all have been closed" — The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 295, 518.
14. R. H. Brand, ed., Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), 321.)
15. "The Financial and Economic Future" in The Round Table (December 1918), IX, 1 14-134. The quotation is from pages 121-123.
16. The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 8. This emphasis on duty to the community is to be found throughout the Milner Group. See, for example, Lord Grey's violent retort to a Canadian (who tried to belittle A. J. Glazebrook because he made no real effort to accumulate wealth) in The Round Table obituary of Glazebrook (March 1941 issue). The same idea was advocated by Hichens and Milner to settle the problems of management and labor within the industrial system. In a speech at Swanwick in 1919, the former said: "The industrial problem is primarily a moral one.... If we have rights, we also have duties.... In the industrial world our duty clearly is to regard our work as the Service which we render to the rest of the community, and it is obvious that we should give, not grudgingly or of necessity but in full measure" (The Round Table, December 1940, XXXI, 11). Milner's views are in Questions of the Hour (London, 1923).
17. In the August 1911 issue of The Round Table the future Lord Lothian wrote: "There are at present two codes of international morality — the British or Anglo-Saxon and the continental or German. Both cannot prevail. If the British Empire is not strong enough to be a real influence for fair dealing between nations, the reactionary standards of the German bureaucracy will triumph, and it will then only be a question of time before the British Empire itself is victimized by an international 'hold-up' on the lines of the Agadir incident. Unless the British peoples are strong enough to make it impossible for backward rivals to attack them with any prospect of success, they will have to accept the political standards of the aggressive military powers" (The Round Table, August 1911, 1, 422-423). What a disaster for the world that Lord Lothian, in March 1936, was not able to take to heart his own words written twenty-five years earlier!
18. As a matter of fact, one American Rhodes Scholar was a Negro; the experiment was not a success, not because of any objections by the English, but because of the objections of other American Rhodes Scholars.
19. L. Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), liii-liv.
20. The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 16, 24.
21. The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 181. See also The Problems of the Commonwealth (London, 1915), 18-19.
22. The quotations from Curtis will be found in The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 181 and 176; also The Problem of the Commonwealth (London, 1915), 18-19; the quotation from Dove is in a long letter to Brand, dated 9 September 1919, in Letters of John Dove, edited by R. H. Brand (London, 1938), 96-106; Philip Kerr's statement will be found in L. Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920),73. See also Kerr's speech at King's College in 1915, published in The Empire and the Future (London, 1916); he attacks jingo-imperialism, racial superiority, and national conceit as "Prussian heresy" and adds: "That the spirit of Prussia has brooded over this land is proved by the shortest examination of the history of Ireland." He then attacks the Little Englanders and economic or commercial imperialism, giving shocking examples of their effects on native lives and cultures. He concludes: "The one thing you cannot do, if you are a human being, is to do nothing. Civilization cannot stand on one side and see native tribes destroyed by so-called civilized looters and marauders, or as the result of the free introduction of firearms, drink, and other instruments of vice. He decides that Britain, by following a middle ground, has "created not an Empire but a Commonwealth" and defines the latter as a community activated by the spirit "Love thy neighbor as thyself." (The Empire and the Future, 70-86). George R. Parkin expresses similar ideas in the same volume on pp. 95-97. Kerr had expressed somewhat similar sentiments in a speech before the Canadian Round Table in Toronto, 30 July 1912. This was published by Glazebrook as a pamphlet (Toronto, 1917).
23. The quotations from A. L. Smith are from The Empire and the Future (London, 1916), 29-30.
Chapter 8
1. The success of the Group in getting the foreign policy they wanted under a Liberal government may be explained by the pressure from without through The Times and the assistance from within through Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, and through the less obvious but no less important work of persons like Sir Eyre Crowe and above all Lord Esher.
2. During this period Lord Esher played a vital but still mysterious role in the government. He was a strong supporter of Milner and his Group and was an influential adviser of Lloyd George. On 12 November 1917, he had a long walk with his protege, Hankey, in Paris and "urged the vital importance of sending Milner as Ambassador, Minister- Plenipotentiary, call him what you will. Henry Wilson cannot stand alone." Later the same day he spoke to Lloyd George: "I urged most strongly that he should send Milner here, on the ground that he would give stability where there is none and that his presence would ensure Henry Wilson getting 'information.' this I urged specially in view of the future as of the present. Otherwise we might one day find the Italian position reproduced in France. He finds Milner almost indispensable, but he will seriously think of the proposal." Milner was sent to Paris, as Esher wished, four months later. On 2 February 1918, Esher had another conversation, in which Lloyd George spoke of putting Milner in Derby's place at the War Office. The change was made two months later. (Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher [4 vols., London, 1938], 158-159 and 178.)
3. Zimmern was unquestionably one of the better minds in the Milner Group, and his ideas were frequently closer to Milner's than those of others of the inner circle. Although Zimmern agreed with the others in 1919 about the severity of the treaty, his reasons were quite different and do credit to both his integrity and his intelligence. He objected to the severity of the treaty because it was a breach of the pre-armistice commitments to the Germans; at the same time he wanted a continuation of the alliance that had won the war and a strong League of Nations, because he had no illusions about converting the Germans to peaceful ways in the near future. The inner circle of the Milner Group were against a severe treaty or a strong League or an alliance with France because they believed that Germany could be converted to the British way of thinking and acting and because they wanted to rebuild Germany as a weapon in a balance-of-power system against "Russian bolshevism" and "French militarism." Part II of Europe in Convalescence (New York, 1922) remains to this day the most brilliant summary available on what went wrong in 1919.
Chapter 9
1. In June 1908, in a speech to the Royal Colonial Institute, Milner said: "Anything like imperial federation — the effective union of the self-governing states — is not, indeed as some think, a dream, but is certainly at present little more than an aspiration" (Milner, The Nation and the Empire [Boston, 1913], 293). In 1891 Sir Charles Tupper said: "Most people have come to the conclusion stated by Lord Rosebery at the Mansion House, that a Parliamentary Federation, if practicable, is so remote that during the coming century it is not likely to make any very great advance." In 1899, Rosebery said: "Imperial Federation in any form is an impossible dream." See H. D. Hall, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1920), 70-71. In October 1905, Joseph Chamberlain said: "You cannot approach closer union by that means." Philip Kerr in 1911 spoke of federation as "the ill-considered proposals of the Imperial Federation League" (The Round Table, August 1911, 1, 374). By this last date, only Lionel Curtis, of the Milner Group, had much faith in the possibility of federation. This is why his name alone was affixed, as editor, to the two volumes published by the Group in 1916.
2. On the secret group of 1903-1905, see H. D. Hall, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1920). The group was clearly made up of members of the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. On its report, see the Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute for 1905, appendix; W. B. Worsfold, The Empire on the Anvil (London, 1916); and R. Jebb, The Imperial Conference (London, 1911), Vol. n. Lyttleton's dispatch is Cond. 2785 of 1905. Kerr's remark is in The Round Table (August 1911), I, 410.
3. This opinion of the important role played by Milner in the period 1916-1921 undoubtedly originated from Geoffrey Dawson, but it was shared by all the members of the Kindergarten. It is stated in different words by Basil Williams in The Dictionary of National Biography and by John Buchan in his autobiography, Pilgrim's Way (Boston, 1940).
4. On the reaction to the speeches of Smuts and Halifax, see J. G. Allen, Editorial Opinion in the Contemporary British Commonwealth and Empire (Boulder, Colorado, 1946).
5. On this whole section, see "George Louis Beer" in The Round Table (September 1920), X, 933-935; G. L. Beer, African Questions at the Peace Conference (New York 1923), 424-425; H. D. Hall, Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeship (Washington, 1948); U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States. Paris Peace Conference 1919, VI, 727-729. That Kerr wrote Article 22 is revealed in H. V. Temperley, History of the Peace Conference, VI, 501. That Curtis wrote" Windows of Freedom" and showed it to Smuts before he wrote his memorandum was revealed by Curtis in a private communication to Professor Quincy Wright, according to Q. Wright, Mandates under the League of Nations (Chicago, 1930), 22-23, note 53a.
6. W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs (3 vols., London, 1940- 1942), 1, 125.
7. S. G. Millen, General Smuts (2 vols., London, 1936), U, 321.
Chapter 10
1. Robert Jemmett Stopford (1895- ) was a banker in London from 1921 to 1928. He was private secretary to the chairman of the Simon Commission in 1928-1930, a member of the "Standstill Committee" on German Foreign Debts, a member of the Runciman Commission to Czechoslovakia in 1938, Liaison Officer for Refugees with the Czechoslovakian government in 1938-1939, Financial Counselor at the British Embassy in Washington in 1943-1945.
Chapter 11
1. See Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London 1938), 11, 56, and III, 8.
2. According to David Ogg, Herbert Fisher, 1865-1940 (London, 1947), 96, Fisher, "helped Mr. Montagu in drafting the Montagu-Chelmsford Report."
3. This memorandum was published, with Lord Halifax's permission, in A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941).
Chapter 12
1. See the minutes of the Council of Four, as recorded by Sir Maurice Hankey, in U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. The Paris Peace Conference, (Washington, D.C., 1946), VI, 138-160.
2. In Europe in Convalescence (New York, 1922), Alfred Zimmern wrote of October 1918 as follows: "Europe, 'from the Rhine to the Volga' to quote from a memorandum written at the time, was in solution. It was not a question now of autocratic against popular government; it was a question of government against anarchy. From one moment to the next every responsible student of public affairs, outside the ranks of the professional revolutionaries, however red his previous affiliations may have been, was turned perforce into a Conservative. The one urgent question was to get Europe back to work" (80).
In The Round Table for December 1918 (91-92) a writer (probably Curtis) stated: "Modern civilization is at grips with two great dangers, the danger of organized militarism . . . and the more insidious, because more pervasive danger of anarchy and class conflict.... As militarism breeds anarchy, so anarchy in its turn breeds militarism. Both are antagonistic to civilization."
In The Round Table for June 1919, Brand wrote: "It is out of any surplus on her foreign balance of trade that Germany can alone — apart from any immediately available assets — pay an indemnity. Why should Germany be able to do the miracle that France and Italy cannot do, and not only balance her trade, but have great surpluses in addition to pay over to her enemies? ... If , as soon as peace is declared, Germany is given assistance and credit, she can pay us something, and should pay all she can. But what she can pay in the next five years must be, we repeat, limited. If, on the other hand, we take away from her all her liquid assets, and all her working capital, if furthermore, she is bound in future to make yearly payments to an amount which will in any reasonable human expectation exceed her capacity, then no one outside of a lunatic asylum will lend her money or credit, and she will not recover sufficiently to pay anything" — War and National Finance (London, 1921), 193.
3. The attitude of the Group toward "French militarism" can be found in many places. Among others, see Smuts's speech of October 1923, quoted below. This attitude was not shared by Professor Zimmern, whose understanding of Europe in general and of France in particular was much more profound than that of other members of the Group. In Europe in Convalescence (158-161) he wrote: "A declaration of British readiness to sign the Guarantee Treaty would be the best possible answer to French, and it may be added also to Belgian fears.... He little knows either the French peasant or the French townsman who thinks that aggression, whether open or concealed, against Germany need ever be feared from their country.... France feels that the same willfully uncomprehending British policy, the same aggravatingly self-righteous professions of rectitude, pursue her in the East, from Danzig to Upper Silesia, as on the Western frontier of her hereditary foe; and in her nervous exasperation she puts herself ever more in the wrong with her impeccably cool-headed neighbor."
The Group's attitude toward Bolshevism was clearly stated is an article in The Round Table for March 1919: "Bolshevism is a tyranny — a revolutionary tyranny if you will — which is the complete abnegation of democracy and of all freedom of thought and action. Based on force and terroristic violence, it is simply following out the same philosophy which was preached by Nietzsche and Haeckel, and which for the past twenty-five years has glorified the might of force as the final justification of all existence.... In its present form Bolshevism must either spread or die. It certainly cannot remain stationary. And at the present moment, it stands as a very real menace to the peace of Europe and to any successful establishment of a League of Nations. This is the real problem which the Allied delegates in Paris have now to face." (The italics are mine.)
4. The German emissary, whose name Smuts does not mention, was Walter de Haas, Ministerialdirektor in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.
5. When the Labour government was in power in 1924 and the Dawes settlement of reparations was an accomplished fact, Stresemann was so afraid that DAbernon would be replaced as British Ambassador in Berlin that he w rote a letter to Lord Parmoor (father of Stafford Cripps, Lord President in the Labour Cabinet, and delegate at the time to the League of Nations), asking that DAbernon be continued in his post as Ambassador. This letter, dated 16 September 1924, was answered by Lord Parmoor on 18 September from Geneva. He said, in part: "I think that in the first instance Lord DAbernon was persuaded to go to Berlin especially in relation to financial and economic difficulties, but perhaps he may be persuaded to stay on, and finish the good work he has begun. In any case your letter is sure to be fully considered by our Foreign Minister, who is also our Prime Minister." See E. Sutton, Gustav Stresemann: His Diaries, Letters, and Papers (New York, 1935), 1,451-454.
6. This paragraph is largely based on J. H. Morgan, Assize of Arms (London, 1945), especially 199, 42, and 268. It is worthy of note that H. A. L. Fisher consulted with both Lord DAbernon and General Morgan on his visit to Germany in 1923 and came away accepting the ideas of the former. Furthermore, when Gilbert Murray went to Geneva in 1924 as League delegate from South Africa, Fisher wrote him instructions to this effect. See D. Ogg, Herbert Fisher (London, 1947), 1 15-117.
7. On this organization see Institute of Politics, Williams College, The Institute of Politics at Williamstown: Its First Decade (Williams/own, Mass., 1931).
8. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, The Great Experiment (London, 1941), 166. The quotations from Lord Esher's Journals and Letters (4 vols., London, 1938) are in Vol. IV, 227, 250, and 272.
9. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, The Great Experiment (London, 1941), 250.
10. The whole memorandum and other valuable documents of this period will be found in USSR, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Documents and Materials Relating to the Eve of the Second World War (5 vole., 1948-1949), Vol. I, November 1937-1938. From the Archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 13-45. The authenticity of these documents was challenged by an "unnamed spokesman" for the British Foreign Office when they were first issued, but I am informed by the highest American authority on the captured German documents that the ones published by the Russians are completely authentic.
11. Keith Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1941), 333. The author is a Fellow of All Souls, close to the Milner Group, and wrote his book on the basis of the late Prime Minister's papers, which were made available by the family.
12. See Lionel Curtis, Civitas Dei; The Commonwealth of God (London, 1938), 914- 930.
13. Robert J. Stopford, a close associate of the Milner Group whom we have already mentioned on several occasions, went to Czechoslovakia with Runciman as a technical adviser. See J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (New York, 1948), 79, n. 1.
14. The reference to Professor Schumann is in J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich (New York, 1948), 436, n.l. If Mr. Wheeler-Bennett had placed a little more credence in the "pre-Munich plot," many of the facts which he cannot explain would be easily fitted into the picture. Among them we might point out the mystifying (to Mr. Wheeler-Bennett) fact that Lord Runciman's report of 16 September went further than either Hitler or Henlein in demanding sacrifices from the Czechs (see Munich, p. 1 12). Or again he would not have had to make such an about-face as that between page 96 and page 97 of the book. On page 96, The Times' s demand of 7 September was similar to the views of Mr. Chamberlain, as expressed at Lady Astor's on 10 May, and "Geoffrey Dawson was a personal friend of Lord Halifax." But on page 97, "The thoughtless irresponsibility of The Times did not voice at that moment the views of His Majesty's Government. If Mr. Wheeler-Bennett had added to his picture a few additional facts, such as a more accurate version of German re-armaments, Runciman's letter of 2 September to Hitler, etc., he would have found it even more difficult to make his picture of Munich stand up.
15. Count Helmuth lames von Moltke, a German of the Resistance (Johannesburg, 1947). See also Allen W. Dulles, Germany's Underground (New York, 1947), 85-90. The additional letter added to the Johannesburg publication was written by von Moltke to his wife just before his death. Curtis's name is mentioned in it.
16. On this whole movement, see Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler (Hinsdale, Illinois, 1948), and F. L. Ford, "The Twentieth of July in the History of the German Resistance" in The American Historical Review (July 1946), LI, 609-626. On Kordt's message to Lord Halifax, see Rothfels, 58-63.
17. A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941), 531.
18. USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Documents and Materials Relating to the Eve of the Second World War. II Dirksen Papers (1938-1939) (Moscow, 1948), 126-131.
19. British Blue Book, Cmd. 6106.
20. All documents on these negotiations will be found in a Swedish Foreign Ministry White Paper, Forspelet till det tyska angreppet pa Danmark och Norge den 9 April 1940 (Stockholm 1947).
Chapter 13
1 . On the Ministry of Information during the war, see Great Britain, Central Office of Information, First Annual Report, 1947-1948. This is Cmd. 7567.
2. This extract is printed in the Report of the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs for 1938-1939.
3. The last important public act of the Milner Group was the drawing of the Italo- Yugoslav boundary in 1946. The British Delegate on the Boundary Commission was C. H. Waldock, now a Chichele Professor and Fellow of All Souls, assisted by R. J. Stopford.
Chapter 6
1 . The Milner Group's control over these lectures appears as much from the list of presiding officers as from the list of lecturers, thus:
President / Speaker / Title
A. D. Steel-Maitland / Michael Sadler / The Universities and the War
Lord Bryce / Charles Lucas / The Empire and Democracy
Lord Milner / A. L. Smith / The People and the Duties of Empire
Lord Selborne / H. A. L. Fisher / Imperial Administration
Earl St. Aldwyn / Philip Kerr / The Commonwealth and the Empire
Lord Sumner / G. R. Parkin / The Duty of the Empire in the World
2. Buckle came to The Times staff in 1880 because of his All Souls connection, being recommended by Sir William Anson, according to the official History of The Times. He was apparently selected to be the future editor from the beginning, since he was given a specially created position as "confidential assistant" to the editor, at a salary "decidedly higher than an Oxford graduate with a good degree could reasonably hope to gain in a few years in any of the regular professions." See The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), II, 529. Buckle may have been the link between Lord Salisbury and The Times, since they could easily meet at All Souls. Obviously The History of the Times, which devotes a full volume of 862 pages to the period of Buckle's editorship, does not tell the full story on Buckle, since he rarely appears on the scene as an actor and would seem, from the History, to have been ignorant of most of what was happening in his offices (the Rhodes-Jameson connection, for example). This is difficult to believe.
The History of The Times is unsatisfactory on other grounds as well. For example, it is not possible from this work to construct a complete record of who held various staff positions. We are told, for example, that Flora Shaw became head of the Colonial Department in 1890, but that ends that department as far as the volume is concerned. There is considerable material on Miss Shaw, especially in the chapters on the Transvaal, but we never find out w ho was her successor, or when she left the staff, or if (as appears likely) the Colonial Department was a creation for her occupancy only and did not survive her (undated) withdrawal from the staff; similarly the exact dates and positions of men like Amery and Grigg are not clear.
3. The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), III, 755.
4. There were others, but they are not of primary, or even secondary importance in the Milner Croup. We might mention Aubrey L. Kennedy (son of Sir John Kennedy of the diplomatic service), who was on The Times staff from 1910 to 1942, in military intelligence in 1914-1919, diplomatic correspondent for the BBC in 1942-1945, and an influential member of Chatham House since 1919.
5. E. Moberly Bell, Flora Shaw (London, 1947), 115.
6. At the suggestion of the British Foreign Office, copies of these articles were circulated in America and in Europe. See E. Moberly Bell, Flora Shaw (London, 1947) 228.
7. The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), 111, 212, 214.
8. All quotations are from The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), III, chapters 7 and 9.
9. See E. T. Cook, Edmund Garrett (London, 1909), 118-119. The difference of opinion between Stead and the others can be traced in F. Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead (2 vols., Boston, 1925), Ch. 21.
The failure of the plotters in Johannesburg to revolt so haunted the plotters elsewhere that they salved their wounds by fantasy. Stead wrote this fantasy for The Review of Reviews annual of January 1897, and consulted with Garrett, who had similar plans for the Christmas 1896 number of the Cape Times. In Stead's story, the Jameson fiasco was to be turned into a smashing success by a heroic South African editor, who, when all appeared lost, would rush to Johannesburg, stir up the revolt, and save the day. Garrett, who was to be the original model for the hero, wrote back: 'A suggestion which will help to keep us distinct, give you a much grander theme, and do something for C.J. R. which no one has yet dared — I went nearer to 'Cecil Rhodes' Dream' but that was a hint only: viz. Make world see what he was driving at and what would have come if all had come off and if Johannesburg had played up.... As to making me the hero. No.... But he must be not only me but you also, and A. Milner, and a few more rolled into one, and he must do what I dreamed of doing but time and space prevented." For the name of this hero Garrett suggested combining the three names into 'Milner Garsted" or "Milstead." Ultimately, Stead made the hero a woman. The new model was probably Flora Shawl The story appeared with the title "The History of a Mystery." See F. Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead, 94-95.
10. Even after the view of the majority prevailed, Stead refused to yield and published his version of a proper defense in The Scandal of the South Africa Committee (London, 1899). It was Stead's belief that preparation for"a raid" was a patriotic act which, if confessed, would have won public acclaim rather than condemnation.
11. On this see Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher, (4 vols., London, 1938N, 1, 196-202.
12. The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), 111, 244. It is clear from Miss Moberly Bell's biography of Flora Shaw (183-188) that Buckle knew this fact at least by 24 May 1897, although Miss Shaw had previously written him a letter stating explicit!) (probably for the record) that she had been acting without either Buckle's or Bell's knowledge. The night before Miss Shaw testified before the Select Committee, Buckle sent her a detailed letter of instruction on how to answer the committee's questions.
13. W. S. Blunt, My Diaries (London, 1932), 226.
14. See The History of The Times (4 vols., London, 1935), 111, 315-316.
Chapter 7
1. L. Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), 41.
There can be no doubt that the original inspiration for the Round Table movement was to be found in anti-German feeling. In fact, there are some indications that this was the primary motive and that the stated purpose of working for imperial federation was, to some extent at least, a mask. The Round Table, in 1940, in its obituary of Abe Bailey (September 1940, XXX, 743-746) attributes its foundation to this cause as follows: "German ambitions to destroy and supplant the British Commonwealth were manifest to those who had eyes to see.... [These asked] 'Can not all the Dominions he brought to realize the common danger that confronts them as much as it confronts Great Britain and think out in mutual discussion the means of uniting all the force and resolution of the Empire in its defense?' To the solution of this question the founders of the Closer Union Societies resolved to apply a similar procedure. Round Table Groups were established in all the British Dominions to study the problem." A similar cause for the founding appeared in The Round Table as recently as the issue of September 1948.
2. The original leader of the Round Table Groups in New Zealand was apparently James Allen (Sir James after 1917), who had been educated in England, at Clifton School and Cambridge University, and was an M. P. in New Zealand from 1887 to 1920. He was Minister of Defense (1912-1920), Minister of Finance and Education (1912-1915), and Minister of Finance (1919-1920), before he became in 1920, New Zealand's High Commissioner in London. He was a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
In the Round Table Group for New Zealand, Allen was soon supplemented and eventually succeeded by William Downie-Stewart as the most important member. Stewart was at the time Mayor of Dunedin (1913) but soon began a twenty-one-year period as an M.P. (1914-1935). He was also Minister of Customs (1921-1928); Minister of Internal Affairs (1921-1924); Minister of Industries and Commerce (1923-1926); Attorney General (1926); Minister of Finance (1926-1928, 1931-1933); Acting Prime Minister (1926); New Zealand delegate to the Ottawa Conference (1932); Vice- Chancellor of Otago University; prominent businessman, and president of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs (1935- ). According to Dove's letters, he attended a Milner Group discussion meeting at Lord Lothian's country house in October 1932.
3. The chief leaders in Australia were Thomas Bavin (Sir Thomas after 1933) and Frederic W. Eggleston (Sir Frederic since 1941). The former, who died in 1941 (see obituary in The Round Table for December 1941), was a barrister in New South Wales from 1897, Professor of Law and Modern History at the University of Tasmania (1900- 1901); private secretary to the first Prime Minister of Australia, Sir Edmund Barton, in 1901-1904; Secretary and Chief Law Officer of Australia in 1907; It. commander in naval intelligence in 1916-1918; an Australian M.P. in 1919-1935; held many cabinet posts in New South Wales from 1922 to 1930, ending as Premier (1927-1930). He finished his career as a judge of the Supreme Court in 1935-1941. He was one of the original members of the Round Table Group in Australia, a regular contributor to The Round Table, and an important member of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Eggleston was a barrister from 1897; a member, correspondent, and chief agent in Australia for The Round Table from 1911; a member of the Legislative Assembly of Australia, (1920-1927); Minister for Railways, (1924-1926); chairman of the Commonwealth Grants Commission, (1934-1941); Minister of China (1941-1944) and to the United States (1944-1946). He was one of the founders and chief officers of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and its representative on the council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.
4. Glazebrook, although virtually unknown, was a very important figure in Canadian life, especially in financial and imperialist circles, up to his death in 1940. For many years he had a practical monopoly in foreign exchange transactions in Toronto, through his firm, Glazebrook and Cronyn (founded 1900). Like most members of the Milner Group, he was interested in adult education, workers' education, and university management. He promoted all of these in Toronto, lecturing himself to the Workers' Educational Association, and at the University of Toronto where he was assistant Professor of Banking and Finance (1926-1937). He was the chief adviser of leading bankers of Canada, and of London and New York bankers on Canadian matters. The Round Table says of him: "Through his friendship with Lord Milner and others he had at one time a wide acquaintance among the prominent figures in British public life, and it is well-known to his intimates that on numerous occasions British ministers, anxious to secure reliable information about certain Canadian affairs through unofficial channels, had recourse of Glazebrook.... By precept and example he exercised an immense influence for good upon the characters and outlook of a number of young Canadians who had the privilege of his society and knew him as 'The Sage.' Some of them, who have come to high place in the life of the Dominion, will not be slow to acknowledge the value of the inspiration and enlightenment which they derived from him. Continually he preached the doctrine to his young friends that it was their duty, if fortune had placed them in comfortable circumstances, to give some of their time to the intelligent study of public affairs and to the service of the community, and he awakened in not a few minds for the first time the idea that there were better goals in life than the making of money. It is true that the Round Table Groups which he organized with such enthusiasm have now faded into oblivion, but many of their members did not lose the zest for an intelligent study of politics which Glazebrook had implanted in them, and after the last war they proved keen supporters of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs as an agency for continuing the political education which Glazebrook had begun."
5. That Curtis consulted with Lord Chelmsford on the planned reforms before Lord Chelmsford went to India in 1916 was revealed in the House of Lords by Lord Crewe on 12 December 1919, and by Curtis in his book Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), xxvii.
6. Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), 74.
7. See R. H. Brand, ed., Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), 115-116.
8. See R. H. Brand, ed., Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), 326, 340.
9. Some of Milner's Canadian speeches in 1908 and in 1912 will be found in The Nation and the Empire (Boston, 1913). Kerr's speech at Toronto on 30 July 1912 was published by Glazebrook in June 1917 as an aid to the war effort. It bore on the cover the inscription "The Round Table in Canada." Curtis's speech, so far as I can determine, is unpublished.
10. See R. L. Schuyler, "The Rise of Anti-Imperialism in England," in The Political Science Quarterly (September 1928 and December 1921); O. D. Skelton, Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Gait (Toronto, 1920),440; and C. A. Bodelson, Studies in Mid- Victorian Imperialism (Copenhagen, 1924), 104.
11. All of these papers will be found in The Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, VI, 36-85; XII, 346-391; and XI, 90-132.
12. The ideas expressed by Lionel Curtis were really Milner's ideas. This was publicly admitted by Milner in a speech before a conference of British and Dominion parliamentarians called together by the Empire Parliamentary Association, 28 July 1916. At this meeting "Milner expressed complete agreement with the general argument of Mr. Curtis, making lengthy quotations from his book, and also accepted the main lines of his plan for Imperial Federation. The resulting discussion showed that not a single Dominion Member present agreed either with Mr. Curtis or Lord Milner." H. D. Hall, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1920), 166. The whole argument of Curtis's book was expressed briefly by Milner in 1913 in the Introduction to The Nation and the Empire.
13. Milner's two letters were in Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), I, 159-160 and 267; On Edward Wood's role, see A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941), 88-95. The project for devolution on a geographic basis for political matters and on a functional basis for economic matters was advocated by The Round Table in an article entitled "Some problems in democracy and reconstruction" in the issue of September 1917. The former type was accepted by Curtis as a method for solving the Irish problem and as a method which might well have been used in solving the Scottish problem in 1707. He wrote: "The continued existence in Edinburgh and London of provincial executives and legislatures, entrusted respectively with interests which were strictly Scottish and strictly English, was not incompatible with the policy of merging Scots and Englishmen in a common state. The possibility of distinguishing local from general interests had not as yet been realized." Again, he wrote: "If ever it should prove expedient to unburden the Parliament of the United Kingdom by delegating to the inhabitants of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales the management of their own provincial affairs and the condition of Ireland should prove no bar to such a measure, the Irish problem will once for all have been closed" — The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 295, 518.
14. R. H. Brand, ed., Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), 321.)
15. "The Financial and Economic Future" in The Round Table (December 1918), IX, 1 14-134. The quotation is from pages 121-123.
16. The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 8. This emphasis on duty to the community is to be found throughout the Milner Group. See, for example, Lord Grey's violent retort to a Canadian (who tried to belittle A. J. Glazebrook because he made no real effort to accumulate wealth) in The Round Table obituary of Glazebrook (March 1941 issue). The same idea was advocated by Hichens and Milner to settle the problems of management and labor within the industrial system. In a speech at Swanwick in 1919, the former said: "The industrial problem is primarily a moral one.... If we have rights, we also have duties.... In the industrial world our duty clearly is to regard our work as the Service which we render to the rest of the community, and it is obvious that we should give, not grudgingly or of necessity but in full measure" (The Round Table, December 1940, XXXI, 11). Milner's views are in Questions of the Hour (London, 1923).
17. In the August 1911 issue of The Round Table the future Lord Lothian wrote: "There are at present two codes of international morality — the British or Anglo-Saxon and the continental or German. Both cannot prevail. If the British Empire is not strong enough to be a real influence for fair dealing between nations, the reactionary standards of the German bureaucracy will triumph, and it will then only be a question of time before the British Empire itself is victimized by an international 'hold-up' on the lines of the Agadir incident. Unless the British peoples are strong enough to make it impossible for backward rivals to attack them with any prospect of success, they will have to accept the political standards of the aggressive military powers" (The Round Table, August 1911, 1, 422-423). What a disaster for the world that Lord Lothian, in March 1936, was not able to take to heart his own words written twenty-five years earlier!
18. As a matter of fact, one American Rhodes Scholar was a Negro; the experiment was not a success, not because of any objections by the English, but because of the objections of other American Rhodes Scholars.
19. L. Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), liii-liv.
20. The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 16, 24.
21. The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 181. See also The Problems of the Commonwealth (London, 1915), 18-19.
22. The quotations from Curtis will be found in The Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1916), 181 and 176; also The Problem of the Commonwealth (London, 1915), 18-19; the quotation from Dove is in a long letter to Brand, dated 9 September 1919, in Letters of John Dove, edited by R. H. Brand (London, 1938), 96-106; Philip Kerr's statement will be found in L. Curtis, Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920),73. See also Kerr's speech at King's College in 1915, published in The Empire and the Future (London, 1916); he attacks jingo-imperialism, racial superiority, and national conceit as "Prussian heresy" and adds: "That the spirit of Prussia has brooded over this land is proved by the shortest examination of the history of Ireland." He then attacks the Little Englanders and economic or commercial imperialism, giving shocking examples of their effects on native lives and cultures. He concludes: "The one thing you cannot do, if you are a human being, is to do nothing. Civilization cannot stand on one side and see native tribes destroyed by so-called civilized looters and marauders, or as the result of the free introduction of firearms, drink, and other instruments of vice. He decides that Britain, by following a middle ground, has "created not an Empire but a Commonwealth" and defines the latter as a community activated by the spirit "Love thy neighbor as thyself." (The Empire and the Future, 70-86). George R. Parkin expresses similar ideas in the same volume on pp. 95-97. Kerr had expressed somewhat similar sentiments in a speech before the Canadian Round Table in Toronto, 30 July 1912. This was published by Glazebrook as a pamphlet (Toronto, 1917).
23. The quotations from A. L. Smith are from The Empire and the Future (London, 1916), 29-30.
Chapter 8
1. The success of the Group in getting the foreign policy they wanted under a Liberal government may be explained by the pressure from without through The Times and the assistance from within through Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, and through the less obvious but no less important work of persons like Sir Eyre Crowe and above all Lord Esher.
2. During this period Lord Esher played a vital but still mysterious role in the government. He was a strong supporter of Milner and his Group and was an influential adviser of Lloyd George. On 12 November 1917, he had a long walk with his protege, Hankey, in Paris and "urged the vital importance of sending Milner as Ambassador, Minister- Plenipotentiary, call him what you will. Henry Wilson cannot stand alone." Later the same day he spoke to Lloyd George: "I urged most strongly that he should send Milner here, on the ground that he would give stability where there is none and that his presence would ensure Henry Wilson getting 'information.' this I urged specially in view of the future as of the present. Otherwise we might one day find the Italian position reproduced in France. He finds Milner almost indispensable, but he will seriously think of the proposal." Milner was sent to Paris, as Esher wished, four months later. On 2 February 1918, Esher had another conversation, in which Lloyd George spoke of putting Milner in Derby's place at the War Office. The change was made two months later. (Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher [4 vols., London, 1938], 158-159 and 178.)
3. Zimmern was unquestionably one of the better minds in the Milner Group, and his ideas were frequently closer to Milner's than those of others of the inner circle. Although Zimmern agreed with the others in 1919 about the severity of the treaty, his reasons were quite different and do credit to both his integrity and his intelligence. He objected to the severity of the treaty because it was a breach of the pre-armistice commitments to the Germans; at the same time he wanted a continuation of the alliance that had won the war and a strong League of Nations, because he had no illusions about converting the Germans to peaceful ways in the near future. The inner circle of the Milner Group were against a severe treaty or a strong League or an alliance with France because they believed that Germany could be converted to the British way of thinking and acting and because they wanted to rebuild Germany as a weapon in a balance-of-power system against "Russian bolshevism" and "French militarism." Part II of Europe in Convalescence (New York, 1922) remains to this day the most brilliant summary available on what went wrong in 1919.
Chapter 9
1. In June 1908, in a speech to the Royal Colonial Institute, Milner said: "Anything like imperial federation — the effective union of the self-governing states — is not, indeed as some think, a dream, but is certainly at present little more than an aspiration" (Milner, The Nation and the Empire [Boston, 1913], 293). In 1891 Sir Charles Tupper said: "Most people have come to the conclusion stated by Lord Rosebery at the Mansion House, that a Parliamentary Federation, if practicable, is so remote that during the coming century it is not likely to make any very great advance." In 1899, Rosebery said: "Imperial Federation in any form is an impossible dream." See H. D. Hall, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1920), 70-71. In October 1905, Joseph Chamberlain said: "You cannot approach closer union by that means." Philip Kerr in 1911 spoke of federation as "the ill-considered proposals of the Imperial Federation League" (The Round Table, August 1911, 1, 374). By this last date, only Lionel Curtis, of the Milner Group, had much faith in the possibility of federation. This is why his name alone was affixed, as editor, to the two volumes published by the Group in 1916.
2. On the secret group of 1903-1905, see H. D. Hall, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1920). The group was clearly made up of members of the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. On its report, see the Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute for 1905, appendix; W. B. Worsfold, The Empire on the Anvil (London, 1916); and R. Jebb, The Imperial Conference (London, 1911), Vol. n. Lyttleton's dispatch is Cond. 2785 of 1905. Kerr's remark is in The Round Table (August 1911), I, 410.
3. This opinion of the important role played by Milner in the period 1916-1921 undoubtedly originated from Geoffrey Dawson, but it was shared by all the members of the Kindergarten. It is stated in different words by Basil Williams in The Dictionary of National Biography and by John Buchan in his autobiography, Pilgrim's Way (Boston, 1940).
4. On the reaction to the speeches of Smuts and Halifax, see J. G. Allen, Editorial Opinion in the Contemporary British Commonwealth and Empire (Boulder, Colorado, 1946).
5. On this whole section, see "George Louis Beer" in The Round Table (September 1920), X, 933-935; G. L. Beer, African Questions at the Peace Conference (New York 1923), 424-425; H. D. Hall, Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeship (Washington, 1948); U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States. Paris Peace Conference 1919, VI, 727-729. That Kerr wrote Article 22 is revealed in H. V. Temperley, History of the Peace Conference, VI, 501. That Curtis wrote" Windows of Freedom" and showed it to Smuts before he wrote his memorandum was revealed by Curtis in a private communication to Professor Quincy Wright, according to Q. Wright, Mandates under the League of Nations (Chicago, 1930), 22-23, note 53a.
6. W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs (3 vols., London, 1940- 1942), 1, 125.
7. S. G. Millen, General Smuts (2 vols., London, 1936), U, 321.
Chapter 10
1. Robert Jemmett Stopford (1895- ) was a banker in London from 1921 to 1928. He was private secretary to the chairman of the Simon Commission in 1928-1930, a member of the "Standstill Committee" on German Foreign Debts, a member of the Runciman Commission to Czechoslovakia in 1938, Liaison Officer for Refugees with the Czechoslovakian government in 1938-1939, Financial Counselor at the British Embassy in Washington in 1943-1945.
Chapter 11
1. See Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London 1938), 11, 56, and III, 8.
2. According to David Ogg, Herbert Fisher, 1865-1940 (London, 1947), 96, Fisher, "helped Mr. Montagu in drafting the Montagu-Chelmsford Report."
3. This memorandum was published, with Lord Halifax's permission, in A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941).
Chapter 12
1. See the minutes of the Council of Four, as recorded by Sir Maurice Hankey, in U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. The Paris Peace Conference, (Washington, D.C., 1946), VI, 138-160.
2. In Europe in Convalescence (New York, 1922), Alfred Zimmern wrote of October 1918 as follows: "Europe, 'from the Rhine to the Volga' to quote from a memorandum written at the time, was in solution. It was not a question now of autocratic against popular government; it was a question of government against anarchy. From one moment to the next every responsible student of public affairs, outside the ranks of the professional revolutionaries, however red his previous affiliations may have been, was turned perforce into a Conservative. The one urgent question was to get Europe back to work" (80).
In The Round Table for December 1918 (91-92) a writer (probably Curtis) stated: "Modern civilization is at grips with two great dangers, the danger of organized militarism . . . and the more insidious, because more pervasive danger of anarchy and class conflict.... As militarism breeds anarchy, so anarchy in its turn breeds militarism. Both are antagonistic to civilization."
In The Round Table for June 1919, Brand wrote: "It is out of any surplus on her foreign balance of trade that Germany can alone — apart from any immediately available assets — pay an indemnity. Why should Germany be able to do the miracle that France and Italy cannot do, and not only balance her trade, but have great surpluses in addition to pay over to her enemies? ... If , as soon as peace is declared, Germany is given assistance and credit, she can pay us something, and should pay all she can. But what she can pay in the next five years must be, we repeat, limited. If, on the other hand, we take away from her all her liquid assets, and all her working capital, if furthermore, she is bound in future to make yearly payments to an amount which will in any reasonable human expectation exceed her capacity, then no one outside of a lunatic asylum will lend her money or credit, and she will not recover sufficiently to pay anything" — War and National Finance (London, 1921), 193.
3. The attitude of the Group toward "French militarism" can be found in many places. Among others, see Smuts's speech of October 1923, quoted below. This attitude was not shared by Professor Zimmern, whose understanding of Europe in general and of France in particular was much more profound than that of other members of the Group. In Europe in Convalescence (158-161) he wrote: "A declaration of British readiness to sign the Guarantee Treaty would be the best possible answer to French, and it may be added also to Belgian fears.... He little knows either the French peasant or the French townsman who thinks that aggression, whether open or concealed, against Germany need ever be feared from their country.... France feels that the same willfully uncomprehending British policy, the same aggravatingly self-righteous professions of rectitude, pursue her in the East, from Danzig to Upper Silesia, as on the Western frontier of her hereditary foe; and in her nervous exasperation she puts herself ever more in the wrong with her impeccably cool-headed neighbor."
The Group's attitude toward Bolshevism was clearly stated is an article in The Round Table for March 1919: "Bolshevism is a tyranny — a revolutionary tyranny if you will — which is the complete abnegation of democracy and of all freedom of thought and action. Based on force and terroristic violence, it is simply following out the same philosophy which was preached by Nietzsche and Haeckel, and which for the past twenty-five years has glorified the might of force as the final justification of all existence.... In its present form Bolshevism must either spread or die. It certainly cannot remain stationary. And at the present moment, it stands as a very real menace to the peace of Europe and to any successful establishment of a League of Nations. This is the real problem which the Allied delegates in Paris have now to face." (The italics are mine.)
4. The German emissary, whose name Smuts does not mention, was Walter de Haas, Ministerialdirektor in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.
5. When the Labour government was in power in 1924 and the Dawes settlement of reparations was an accomplished fact, Stresemann was so afraid that DAbernon would be replaced as British Ambassador in Berlin that he w rote a letter to Lord Parmoor (father of Stafford Cripps, Lord President in the Labour Cabinet, and delegate at the time to the League of Nations), asking that DAbernon be continued in his post as Ambassador. This letter, dated 16 September 1924, was answered by Lord Parmoor on 18 September from Geneva. He said, in part: "I think that in the first instance Lord DAbernon was persuaded to go to Berlin especially in relation to financial and economic difficulties, but perhaps he may be persuaded to stay on, and finish the good work he has begun. In any case your letter is sure to be fully considered by our Foreign Minister, who is also our Prime Minister." See E. Sutton, Gustav Stresemann: His Diaries, Letters, and Papers (New York, 1935), 1,451-454.
6. This paragraph is largely based on J. H. Morgan, Assize of Arms (London, 1945), especially 199, 42, and 268. It is worthy of note that H. A. L. Fisher consulted with both Lord DAbernon and General Morgan on his visit to Germany in 1923 and came away accepting the ideas of the former. Furthermore, when Gilbert Murray went to Geneva in 1924 as League delegate from South Africa, Fisher wrote him instructions to this effect. See D. Ogg, Herbert Fisher (London, 1947), 1 15-117.
7. On this organization see Institute of Politics, Williams College, The Institute of Politics at Williamstown: Its First Decade (Williams/own, Mass., 1931).
8. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, The Great Experiment (London, 1941), 166. The quotations from Lord Esher's Journals and Letters (4 vols., London, 1938) are in Vol. IV, 227, 250, and 272.
9. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, The Great Experiment (London, 1941), 250.
10. The whole memorandum and other valuable documents of this period will be found in USSR, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Documents and Materials Relating to the Eve of the Second World War (5 vole., 1948-1949), Vol. I, November 1937-1938. From the Archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 13-45. The authenticity of these documents was challenged by an "unnamed spokesman" for the British Foreign Office when they were first issued, but I am informed by the highest American authority on the captured German documents that the ones published by the Russians are completely authentic.
11. Keith Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1941), 333. The author is a Fellow of All Souls, close to the Milner Group, and wrote his book on the basis of the late Prime Minister's papers, which were made available by the family.
12. See Lionel Curtis, Civitas Dei; The Commonwealth of God (London, 1938), 914- 930.
13. Robert J. Stopford, a close associate of the Milner Group whom we have already mentioned on several occasions, went to Czechoslovakia with Runciman as a technical adviser. See J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (New York, 1948), 79, n. 1.
14. The reference to Professor Schumann is in J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich (New York, 1948), 436, n.l. If Mr. Wheeler-Bennett had placed a little more credence in the "pre-Munich plot," many of the facts which he cannot explain would be easily fitted into the picture. Among them we might point out the mystifying (to Mr. Wheeler-Bennett) fact that Lord Runciman's report of 16 September went further than either Hitler or Henlein in demanding sacrifices from the Czechs (see Munich, p. 1 12). Or again he would not have had to make such an about-face as that between page 96 and page 97 of the book. On page 96, The Times' s demand of 7 September was similar to the views of Mr. Chamberlain, as expressed at Lady Astor's on 10 May, and "Geoffrey Dawson was a personal friend of Lord Halifax." But on page 97, "The thoughtless irresponsibility of The Times did not voice at that moment the views of His Majesty's Government. If Mr. Wheeler-Bennett had added to his picture a few additional facts, such as a more accurate version of German re-armaments, Runciman's letter of 2 September to Hitler, etc., he would have found it even more difficult to make his picture of Munich stand up.
15. Count Helmuth lames von Moltke, a German of the Resistance (Johannesburg, 1947). See also Allen W. Dulles, Germany's Underground (New York, 1947), 85-90. The additional letter added to the Johannesburg publication was written by von Moltke to his wife just before his death. Curtis's name is mentioned in it.
16. On this whole movement, see Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler (Hinsdale, Illinois, 1948), and F. L. Ford, "The Twentieth of July in the History of the German Resistance" in The American Historical Review (July 1946), LI, 609-626. On Kordt's message to Lord Halifax, see Rothfels, 58-63.
17. A. C. Johnson, Viscount Halifax (New York, 1941), 531.
18. USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Documents and Materials Relating to the Eve of the Second World War. II Dirksen Papers (1938-1939) (Moscow, 1948), 126-131.
19. British Blue Book, Cmd. 6106.
20. All documents on these negotiations will be found in a Swedish Foreign Ministry White Paper, Forspelet till det tyska angreppet pa Danmark och Norge den 9 April 1940 (Stockholm 1947).
Chapter 13
1 . On the Ministry of Information during the war, see Great Britain, Central Office of Information, First Annual Report, 1947-1948. This is Cmd. 7567.
2. This extract is printed in the Report of the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs for 1938-1939.
3. The last important public act of the Milner Group was the drawing of the Italo- Yugoslav boundary in 1946. The British Delegate on the Boundary Commission was C. H. Waldock, now a Chichele Professor and Fellow of All Souls, assisted by R. J. Stopford.
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