Carroll Quigley
The Anglo-American Establishment

12
Foreign Policy, 1919-1940

Any Effort to write an account of the influence exercised by the Milner Group in foreign affairs in the period between the two World Wars would require a complete rewriting of the history of that period.  This cannot be done within the limits of a single chapter, and it will not be attempted.  Instead, an effort will be made to point out the chief ideas of the Milner Group in this field, the chief methods by which they were able to make those ideas prevail, and a few significant examples of how these methods worked in practice.

The political power of the Milner Group in the period 1919-1939 grew quite steadily.  It can be measured by the number of ministerial portfolios held by members of the Group.  In the first period, 1919-1924, they generally held about one-fifth of the Cabinet posts.  For example, the Cabinet that resigned in January 1924 had nineteen members;  four were of the Milner Group, only one from the inner circle.  These four were Leopold Amery, Edward Wood, Samuel Hoare, and Lord Robert Cecil.  In addition, in the same period other members of the Group were in the government in one position or another.  Among these were Milner, Austen Chamberlain, H.A.L. Fisher, Lord Ernle, Lord Astor, Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, and W.G.A. Ormsby-Gore.  Also, relatives of these, such as Lord Onslow (brother-in-law of Lord Halifax), Captain Lane-Fox (brother-in-law of Lord Halifax), and Lord Greenwood (brother-in-law of Amery), were in the government.

In this period the influence of the Milner Group was exercised in two vitally significant political acts.  In the first case, the Milner Group appears to have played an important role behind the scenes in persuading the King to ask Baldwin rather than Curzon to be Prime Minister in 1923.  Harold Nicolson, in Curzon:  The Last Phase (1934), says that Balfour, Amery, and Walter Long intervened with the King to oppose Curzon, and “the cumulative effect of these representations was to reverse the previous decision.”  Of the three names mentioned by Nicolson, two were of the Cecil Bloc, while the third was Milner’s closest associate.  If Amery did intervene, he undoubtedly did so as the representative of Milner, and if Milner opposed Curzon to this extent through Amery, he was in a position to bring other powerful influences to bear on His Majesty through Lord Esher as well as through Brand’s brother, Viscount Hampden, a lord-in-waiting to the King, or more directly through Milner’s son-in-law, Captain Alexander Hardinge, a private secretary to the King.  In any case, Milner exercised a very powerful influence on Baldwin during the period of his first government, and it was on Milner’s advice that Baldwin waged the General Election of 1924 on the issue of protection.  The election manifesto issued by the party and advocating a tariff was written by Milner in consultation with Arthur Steel-Maitland.

In the period 1924-1929 the Milner Group usually held about a third of the seats in the Cabinet (seven out of twenty-one in the government formed in November 1924).  These proportions were also held in the period 1935-1940, with a somewhat smaller ratio in the period 1931-1935.  In the Cabinet that was formed in the fall of 1931, the Milner Group exercised a peculiar influence.  The Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald was in office with a minority government from 1929 to September 1931.  Toward the end of this period, the Labour government experienced increasing difficulty because the deflationary policy of the Bank of England and the outflow of gold from the country were simultaneously intensifying the depression, increasing unemployment and public discontent, and jeopardizing the gold standard.  In fact, the Bank of England’s policy made it almost impossible for the Labour Party to govern.  Without informing his Cabinet, Ramsay MacDonald entered upon negotiations with Baldwin and King George, as a result of which MacDonald became Prime Minister of a new government, supported by Conservative votes in Parliament.  The obvious purpose of this intrigue was to split the Labour Party and place the administration back in Conservative hands.

In this intrigue the Milner Group apparently played an important, if secret, role.  That they were in a position to play such a role is clear.  We have mentioned the pressure which the bankers were putting on the Labour government in the period 1929-1931.  The Milner Group were clearly in a position to influence this pressure.  E.R. Peacock (Parkin’s old associate) was at the time a director of the Bank of England and a director of Baring Brothers;  Robert Brand, Thomas Henry Brand, and Adam Marris (son of Sir William Marris) were all at Lazard and Brothers;  Robert Brand was also a director of Lloyd’s Bank;  Lord Selborne was a director of Lloyd’s Bank;  Lord Lugard was a director of Barclay’s Bank;  Major Astor was a director of Hambros Bank;  and Lord Goschen was a director of the Westminster Bank.

We have already indicated the ability of the Milner Group to influence the King in respect to the choice of Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1923.  By 1931 this power was even greater.  Thus the Milner Group was in a position to play a role in the intrigue of 1931.  That they may have done so is to be found in the fact that two of the important figures in this intrigue within the Labour Party were ever after closely associated with the Milner Group.  These two were Malcolm MacDonald and Godfrey Elton.

Malcolm MacDonald, son and intimate associate of Ramsay MacDonald, clearly played an important role in the intrigue of 1931.  He was rewarded with a position in the new government and has never been out of office since.  These offices included Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Dominions Office (1931-1935), Secretary of State for the Dominions (1935-1938 and 1938-1939), Secretary of State for the Colonies (1935-and 1938-1940), Minister of Health (1940-1941), United Kingdom High Commissioner in Canada (1941-1946), Governor-General of Malaya and British South-East Asia (since 1946).  Since all of these offices but one (Minister of Health) were traditionally in the sphere of the Milner Group, and since Malcolm MacDonald during this period was closely associated with the Group in its other activities, such as Chatham House and the unofficial British Commonwealth relations conferences, Malcolm MacDonald should probably be regarded as a member of the Group from about 1932 onward.

Godfrey Elton (Lord Elton since 1934), of Rugby and Balliol, was a Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, from 1919, as well as lecturer on Modern History at Oxford.  In this role Elton came in contact with Malcolm MacDonald, who was an undergraduate at Queen’s in the period 1920-1925.  Through this connection, Elton ran for Parliament on the Labour Party ticket in 1924 and again in 1929, both times without success.  He was more successful in establishing himself as an intellectual leader of the Labour Party, capping this by publishing in 1931 a study of the early days of the party.  As a close associate of the MacDonald family, he supported the intrigue of 1931 and played a part in it.  For this he was expelled from the party and became honorary political secretary of the new National Labour Committee and editor of its News-Letter (1932-1938).  He was made a baron in 1934, was on the Ullswater Committee on the Future of Broadcasting the following year, and in 1939 succeeded Lord Lothian as Secretary to the Rhodes Trustees.  By his close association with the MacDonald family, he became the obvious choice to write the “official” life of J.R. (Ramsay) MacDonald, the first volume of which was published in 1939.  In 1945 he published a history of the British Empire called Imperial Commonwealth.

After the election of 1935, the Milner Group took a substantial part in the government, with possession of seven places in a Cabinet of twenty-one seats.  By the beginning of September of 1939, they had only five out of twenty-three, the decrease being caused, as we shall see, by the attrition within the Group on the question of appeasement.  In the War Cabinet formed at the outbreak of the war, they had four out of nine seats.  In this whole period from 1935 to 1940, the following members of the Group were associated with the government as officers of state:  Halifax, Simon, Malcolm MacDonald, Zetland, Ormsby-Gore, Hoare, Somervell, Lothian, Hankey, Grigg, Salter, and Amery.

It would appear that the Milner Group increased its influence on the government until about 1938.  We have already indicated the great power which they exercised in the period 1915-1919.  This influence, while great, was neither decisive nor preponderant.  At the time, the Milner Group was sharing influence with at least two other groups and was, perhaps, the least powerful of the three.  It surely was less powerful than the Cecil Bloc, even as late as 1929, and was less.  powerful, perhaps, than the rather isolated figure of Lloyd George as late as 1922.  These relative degrees of power on the whole do not amount to very much, because the three that we have mentioned generally agreed on policy.  When they disagreed, the views of the Milner Group did not usually prevail.  There were two reasons for this.  Both the Cecil Bloc and Lloyd George were susceptible to pressure from the British electorate and from the allies of Britain.  The Milner Group, as a non-elected group, could afford to be disdainful of the British electorate and of French opinion, but the persons actually responsible for the government, like Lloyd George, Balfour, and others, could not be so casual.  As a consequence, the Milner Group were bitterly disappointed over the peace treaty with Germany and over the Covenant of the League of Nations.  This may seem impossible when we realize how much the Group contributed to both of these.  For they did contribute a great deal, chiefly because of the fact that the responsible statesmen generally accepted the opinion of the experts on the terms of the treaty, especially the territorial terms.  There is only one case where the delegates overruled a committee of experts that was unanimous, and that was the case of the Polish Corridor, where the experts were more severe with Germany than the final agreement.  The experts, thus, were of very great importance, and among the experts the Milner Group had an important place, as we have seen.  It would thus seem that the Milner Group’s disappointment with the peace settlement was largely criticism of their own handiwork.  To a considerable extent this is true.  The explanation lies in the fact that much of what they did as experts was done on instructions from the responsible delegates and the fact that the Group ever after had a tendency to focus their eyes on the few blemishes of the settlement, to the complete neglect of the much larger body of acceptable decisions.  Except for this, the Group could have no justification for their dissatisfaction except as self-criticism.  When the original draft of the Treaty of Versailles was presented to the Germans on 7 May 1919, the defeated delegates were aghast at its severity.  They drew up a detailed criticism of 443 pages.  The answer to this protest, making a few minor changes in the treaty but allowing the major provisions to stand, was drafted by an interallied committee of five, of which Philip Kerr was the British member.  The changes that were made as concessions to the Germans were made under pressure from Lloyd George, who was himself under pressure from the Milner Group.  This appears clearly from the minutes of the Council of Four at the Peace Conference.  The first organized drive to revise the draft of the treaty in the direction of leniency was made by Lloyd George at a meeting of the Council of Four on 2 June 1919.  The Prime Minister said he had been consulting with his delegation and with the Cabinet.  He specifically mentioned George Barnes (“the only Labour representative in his Cabinet”), the South African delegation (who “were also refusing to sign the present Treaty”), Mr. Fisher (“whose views carried great weight”), Austen Chamberlain, Lord Robert Cecil, and both the Archbishops.  Except for Barnes and the Archbishops, all of these were close to the Milner Group.  The reference to H.A.L. Fisher is especially significant, for Fisher’s views could “carry great weight” only insofar as he was a member of the Milner Group.  The reference to the South African delegation meant Smuts, for Botha was prepared to sign, no matter what he felt about the treaty, in order to win for his country official recognition as a Dominion of equal status with Britain.  Smuts, on the other hand, refused to sign from the beginning and, as late as 23 June 1919, reiterated his refusal (according to Mrs. Millen’s biography of Smuts).

Lloyd George’s objections to the treaty as presented in the Council of Four on 2 June were those which soon became the trademark of the Milner Group.  In addition to criticisms of the territorial clauses on the Polish frontier and a demand for a plebiscite in Upper Silesia, the chief objections were aimed at reparations and the occupation of the Rhineland.  On the former point, Lloyd George’s advisers “thought that more had been asked for than Germany could pay.”  On the latter point, which “was the main British concern,” his advisers were insistent.  “They urged that when the German Army was reduced to a strength of 100,000 men it was ridiculous to maintain an army of occupation of 200,000 men on the Rhine.  They represented that it was only a method of quartering the French Army on Germany and making Germany pay the cost.  It had been pointed out that Germany would not constitute a danger to France for 30 years or even 50 years;  certainly not in 15 years.... The advice of the British military authorities was that two years was the utmost limit of time for the occupation.”

To these complaints, Clemenceau had replied that “in England the view seemed to prevail that the easiest way to finish the war was by making concessions.  In France the contrary view was held that it was best to act firmly.  The French people, unfortunately, knew the Germans very intimately, and they believed that the more concessions we made, the more the Germans would demand.... He recognized that Germany was not an immediate menace to France.  But Germany would sign the Treaty with every intention of not carrying it out.  Evasions would be made first on one point and then on another.  The whole Treaty would go by the board if there were not some guarantees such as were provided by the occupation.”^[1]

Under such circumstances as these, it seems rather graceless for the Milner Group to have started at once, as it did, a campaign of recrimination against the treaty.  Philip Kerr was from 1905 to his death in 1940 at the very center of the Milner Group.  His violent Germanophobia in 1908-1918, and his evident familiarity with the character of the Germans and with the kind of treaty which they would have imposed on Britain had the roles been reversed, should have made the Treaty of Versailles very acceptable to him and his companions, or, if not, unacceptable on grounds of excessive leniency.  Instead, Kerr, Brand, Curtis, and the whole inner core of the Milner Group began a campaign to undermine the treaty, the League of Nations, and the whole peace settlement.  Those who are familiar with the activities of the “Cliveden Set” in the 1930s have generally felt that the appeasement policy associated with that group was a manifestation of the period after 1934 only.  This is quite mistaken.  The Milner Group, which was the reality behind the phantom-like Cliveden Set, began their program of appeasement and revision of the settlement as early as 1919.  Why did they do this?

To answer this question, we must fall back on the statements of the members of the Group, general impressions of their psychological outlook, and even a certain amount of conjecture.  The best statement of what the Group found objectionable in the peace of 1919 will be found in a brilliant book of Zimmern’s called Europe in Convalescence (1922).  More concrete criticism, especially in regard to the Covenant of the League, will be found in The Round Table.  And the general mental outlook of the Group in 1919 will be found in Harold Nicolson’s famous book Peace-Making.  Nicolson, although on close personal relationships with most of the inner core of the Milner Group, was not a member of the Group himself, but his psychology in 1918-1920 was similar to that of the members of the inner core.

In general, the members of this inner core took the propagandist slogans of 1914-1918 as a truthful picture of the situation.  I have indicated how the Group had worked out a theory of history that saw the whole past in terms of a long struggle between the forces of evil and the forces of righteousness.  The latter they defined at various times as “the rule of law” (a la Dicey), as “the subordination of each to the welfare of all,” as “democracy,” etc.  They accepted Wilson’s identification of his war aims with his war slogans (“a world safe for democracy,” “a war to end wars,” “a war to end Prussianism,” “self-determination,” etc.) as meaning what they meant by “the rule of law.”  They accepted his Fourteen Points (except “freedom of the seas”) as implementation of these aims.  Moreover, the Milner Group, and apparently Wilson, made an assumption which had a valid basis but which could be very dangerous if carried out carelessly.  This was the assumption that the Germans were divided into two groups, “Prussian autocrats” and “good Germans.”  They assumed that, if the former group were removed from positions of power and influence, and magnanimous concessions were made to the latter, Germany could be won over on a permanent basis from “Asiatic despotism” to “Western civilization.”  In its main outlines, the thesis was valid.  But difficulties were numerous.

In the first place, it is not possible to distinguish between “good” Germans and “bad” Germans by any objective criterion.  The distinction certainly could not be based on who was in public office in 1914-1918.  In fact, the overwhelming mass of Germans — almost all the middle classes, except a few intellectuals and very religious persons;  a considerable portion of the aristocratic class (at least half);  and certain segments of the working class (about one-fifth) — were “bad” Germans in the sense in which the Milner Group used that expression.  In their saner moments, the Group knew this.  In December 1918, Curtis wrote in The Round Table on this subject as follows:  “No one class, but the nation itself was involved in the sin.  There were Socialists who licked their lips over Brest-Litovsk.  All but a mere remnant, and those largely in prison or exile, accepted or justified the creed of despotism so long as it promised them the mastery of the world.  The German People consented to be slaves in their own house as the price of enslaving mankind.”  If these words had been printed and posted on the walls of All Souls, of Chatham House, of New College, of The Times office in Printing House Square, and of The Round Table office at 175 Piccadilly, there need never have been a Second World War with Germany.  But these words were not remembered by the Group.  Instead, they assumed that the “bad” Germans were the small group that was removed from office in 1918 with the Kaiser.  They did not see that the Kaiser was merely a kind of facade for four other groups:  The Prussian Officers’ Corps, the Junker landlords, the governmental bureaucracy (especially the administrators of police and justice), and the great industrialists.  They did not see that these four had been able to save themselves in 1918 by jettisoning the Kaiser, who had become a liability.  They did not see that these four were left in their positions of influence, with their power practically intact—indeed, in many ways with their power greater than ever, since the new “democratic” politicians like Ebert, Scheidemann, and Noske were much more subservient to the four groups than the old imperial authorities had ever been.  General Groner gave orders to Ebert over his direct telephone line from Kassel in a tone and with a directness that he would never have used to an imperial chancellor.  In a word, there was no revolution in Germany in 1918.  The Milner Group did not see this, because they did not want to see it.  Not that they were not warned.  Brigadier General John H. Morgan, who was almost a member of the Group and who was on the Interallied Military Commission of Control in Germany in 1919-1923, persistently warned the government and the Group of the continued existence and growing power of the German Officers’ Corps and of the unreformed character of the German people.  As a graduate of Balliol and the University of Berlin (1897-1905), a leader-writer on The Manchester Guardian (1904-1905), a Liberal candidate for Parliament with Amery in 1910, an assistant adjutant general with the military section of the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919, the British member on the Prisoners of War Commission (1919), legal editor of The Encyclopedia Britannica (14th edition), contributor to The Times, reader in constitutional law to the Inns of Court (1926-1936), Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of London, Rhodes Lecturer at London (1927-1932), counsel to the Indian Chamber of Princes (1934-1937), counsel to the Indian State of Gwalior, Tagore Professor at Calcutta (1939) — as all of these things, and thus close to many members of the Group, General Morgan issued warnings about Germany that should have been heeded by the Group.  They were not.  No more attention was paid to them than was paid to the somewhat similar warnings coming from Professor Zimmern.  And the general, with less courage than the professor, or perhaps with more of that peculiar group loyalty which pervades his social class in England, kept his warnings secret and private for years.  Only in October 1924 did he come out in public with an article in the Quarterly Review on the subject, and only in 1945 did he find a wider platform in a published book (Assize of Arms), but in neither did he name the persons who were suppressing the warnings in his official reports from the Military Commission.

In a similar fashion, the Milner Group knew that the industrialists, the Junkers, the police, and the judges were cooperating with the reactionaries to suppress all democratic and enlightened elements in Germany and to help all the forces of “despotism” and “sin” (to use Curtis’s words).  The Group refused to recognize these facts.  For this, there were two reasons.  One, for which Brand was chiefly responsible, was based on certain economic assumptions.  Among these, the chief was the belief that “disorder” and social unrest could be avoided only if prosperity were restored to Germany as soon as possible.  By “disorder,” Brand meant such activities as were associated with Trotsky in Russia, Béla Kun in Hungary, and the Spartacists or Kurt Eisner in Germany.  To Brand, as an orthodox international banker, prosperity could be obtained only by an economic system under the control of the old established industrialists and bankers.  This is perfectly clear from Brand’s articles in The Round Table, reprinted in his book, War and National Finance (1921).  Moreover, Brand felt confident that the old economic groups could reestablish prosperity quickly only if they were given concessions in respect to Germany’s international financial position by lightening the weight of reparations on Germany and by advancing credit to Germany, chiefly from the United States.  This point of view was not Brand’s alone.  It dominated the minds of all international bankers from Thomas Lamont to Montague Norman and from 1918 to at least 1931.  The importance of Brand, from out point of view, lies in the fact that, as “the economic expert” of the Milner Group and one of the leaders of the Group, he brought this point of view into the Group and was able to direct the great influence of the Group in this direction.^[2]

Blindness to the real situation in Germany was also encouraged from another point of view.  This was associated with Philip Kerr.  Roughly, this point of view advocated a British foreign policy based on the old balance-of-power system.  Under that old system, which Britain had followed since 1500, Britain should support the second strongest power on the Continent against the strongest power, to prevent the latter from obtaining supremacy on the Continent.  For one brief moment in 1918, the Group toyed with the idea of abandoning this traditional policy;  for one brief moment they felt that if Europe were given self-determination and parliamentary governments, Britain could permit some kind of federated or at least cooperative Europe without danger to Britain.  The moment soon passed.  The League of Nations, which had been regarded by the Group as the seed whence a united Europe might grow, became nothing more than a propaganda machine, as soon as the Group resumed its belief in the balance of power.  Curtis, who in December 1918 wrote in The Round Table:  “That the balance of power has outlived its time by a century and that the world has remained a prey to wars, was due to the unnatural alienation of the British and American Commonwealths” — Curtis, who wrote this in 1918, four years later (9 January 1923) vigorously defended the idea of balance of power against the criticism of Professor A.F. Pollard at a meeting of the RIIA.

This change in point of view was based on several factors.  In the first place, the Group, by their practical experience at Paris in 1919, found that it was not possible to apply either self-determination or the parliamentary form of government to Europe.  As a result of this experience, they listened with more respect to the Cecil Bloc, which always insisted that these, especially the latter, were intimately associated with the British outlook, way of life, and social traditions, and were not articles of export.  This issue was always the chief bone of contention between the Group and the Bloc in regard to India.  In India, where their own influence as pedagogues was important, the Group did not accept the Bloc’s arguments completely, but in Europe, where the Group’s influence was remote and indirect, the Group was more receptive.

In the second place, the Group at Paris became alienated from the French because of the latter’s insistence on force as the chief basis of social and political life, especially the French insistence on a permanent mobilization of force to keep Germany down and on an international police force with autonomous power as a part of the League of Nations.  The Group, although they frequently quoted Admiral Mahan’s kind words about force in social life, did not really like force and shrank from its use, believing, as might be expected from their Christian background, that force could not avail against moral issues, that force corrupts those who use it, and that the real basis of social and political life was custom and tradition.  At Paris the Group found that they were living in a different world from the French.  They suddenly saw not only that they did not have the same outlook as their former allies, but that these allies embraced the “despotic” and “militaristic” outlook against which the late war had been waged.  At once, the Group began to think that the influence which they had been mobilizing against Prussian despotism since 1907 could best be mobilized, now that Prussianism was dead, against French militarism and Bolshevism.  And what better ally against these two enemies in the West and the East than the newly baptized Germany?  Thus, almost without realizing it, the Group fell back into the old balance-of-power pattern.  Their aim became the double one of keeping Germany in the fold of redeemed sinners by concessions, and of using this revived and purified Germany against Russia and France.^[3]

In the third place, the Group in 1918 had been willing to toy with the idea of an integrated Europe because, in 1918, they believed that a permanent system of cooperation between Britain and the United States was a possible outcome of the war.  This was the lifelong dream of Rhodes, of Milner, of Lothian, of Curtis.  For that they would have sacrificed anything within reason.  When it became clear in 1920 that the United States had no intention of underwriting Britain and instead would revert to her prewar isolationism, the bitterness of disappointment in the Milner Group were beyond bounds.  Forever after, they blamed the evils of Europe, the double-dealing of British policy, and the whole train of errors from 1919 to 1940 on the American reversion to isolationism.  It should be clearly understood that by American reversion to isolationism the Milner Group did not mean the American rejection of the League of Nations.  Frequently they said that they did mean this, that the disaster of 1939-1940 became inevitable when the Senate rejected the League of Nations in 1920.  This is completely untrue, both as a statement of historical fact and as a statement of the Group’s attitude toward that rejection at the time.  As we shall see in a moment, the Group approved of the Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations, because the reasons for that rejection agreed completely with the Group’s own opinion about the League.  The only change in the Group’s opinion, as a result of the Senate’s rejection of the League, occurred in respect to the Group’s opinion regarding the League itself.  Previously they had disliked the League;  now they hated it—except as a propaganda agency.  The proofs of these statements will appear in a moment.

The change in the Group’s attitude toward Germany began even before the war ended.  We have indicated how the Group rallied to give a public testimonial of faith in Lord Milner in October 1918, when he became the target of public criticism because of what was regarded by the public as a conciliatory speech toward Germany.  The Group objected violently to the anti-German tone in which Lloyd George conducted his electoral campaign in the “khaki election” of December 1918.  The Round Table in March 1919 spoke of Lloyd George and “the odious character of his election campaign.”  Zimmern, after a devastating criticism of Lloyd George’s conduct in the election, wrote:  “He erred, not, like the English people, out of ignorance but deliberately, out of cowardice and lack of faith.”  In the preface to the same volume (Europe in Convalescence) he wrote:  “Since December, 1918, when we elected a Parliament pledged to violate a solemn agreement made but five weeks earlier, we stand shamed, dishonoured, and, above all, distrusted before mankind.”  The agreement to which Zimmern referred was the so-called Pre-Armistice Agreement of 5 November 1918, made with the Germans, by which, if they accepted an armistice, the Allies agreed to make peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points.  It was the thesis of the Milner Group that the election of 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles as finally signed violated this Pre-Armistice Agreement.  As a result, the Group at once embarked on its campaign for revision of the treaty, a campaign whose first aim, apparently, was to create a guilty conscience in regard to the treaty in Britain and the United States.  Zimmern’s book, Brand’s book of the previous year, and all the articles of The Round Table were but ammunition in this campaign.  However, Zimmern had no illusions about the Germans, and his attack on the treaty was based solely on the need to redeem British honor.  As soon as it became clear to him that the Group was going beyond this motive and was trying to give concessions to the Germans without any attempt to purge Germany of its vicious elements and without any guarantee that those concessions would not be used against everything the Group held dear, he left the inner circle of the Group and moved to the second circle.  He was not convinced that Germany could be redeemed by concessions made blindly to Germany as a whole, or that Germany should be built up against France and Russia.  He made his position clear in a brilliant and courageous speech at Oxford in May 1925, a speech in which he denounced the steady sabotage of the League of Nations.  It is not an accident that the most intelligent member of the Group was the first member to break publicly with the policy of appeasement.

The Milner Group thus regarded the Treaty of Versailles as too severe, as purely temporary, and as subject to revision almost at once.  When The Round Table examined the treaty in its issue of June 1919, it said, in substance:  “The punishment of Germany was just, for no one can believe in any sudden change of heart in that country, but the treaty is too severe.  The spirit of the Pre-Armistice Commitments was violated, and, in detail after detail, Germany was treated unjustly, although there is broad justice in the settlement as a whole.  Specifically the reparations are too severe, and Germany’s neighbors should have been forced to disarm also, as promised in Wilson’s Fourth Point.  No demand should have been made for William II as a war criminal.  If he is a menace, he should be put on an island without trial, like Napoleon.  Our policy must be magnanimous, for our war was with the German government, not with the German people.”  Even earlier, in December 1918, The Round Table said:  “It would seem desirable that the treaties should not be long term, still less perpetual, instruments.  Perpetual treaties are indeed a lien upon national sovereignty and a standing contradiction of the principle of the democratic control of foreign policy. ... It would establish a salutory precedent if the network of treaties signed as a result of the war were valid for a period of ten years only.”  In March 1920, The Round Table said:  “Like the Peace Conference, the Covenant of the League of Nations aimed too high and too far.  Six months ago we looked to it to furnish the means for peaceful revision of the terms of the peace, where revision might be required.  Now we have to realize that national sentiment sets closer limits to international action than we were willing then to recognize.”  The same article then goes on to speak of the rejection of the treaty by the United States Senate.  It defends this action and criticizes Wilson severely, saying:  “The truth of the matter is that the American Senate has expressed the real sentiment of all nations with hard-headed truthfulness. ... The Senate has put into words what has already been demonstrated in Europe by the logic of events—namely that the Peace of Versailles attempted too much, and the Covenant which guarantees it implies a capacity for united action between the Allies which the facts do not warrant.  The whole Treaty was, in fact, framed to meet the same impractical desire which we have already noted in the reparation terms—the desire to mete out ideal justice and to build an ideal world.”

Nowhere is the whole point of view of the Milner Group better stated than in a speech of General Smuts to the South African Luncheon Club in London, 23 October 1923.  After violent criticism of the reparations as too large and an attack on the French efforts to enforce these clauses, he called for a meeting “of principals” to settle the problem.  He then pointed out that a continuation of existing methods would lead to the danger of German disintegration, “a first-class and irreparable disaster.... It would mean immediate economic chaos, and it would open up the possibility of future political dangers to which I need not here refer.  Germany is both economically and politically necessary to Central Europe.”  He advocated applying to Germany “the benevolent policy which this country adopted toward France after the Napoleonic War.... And if, as I hope she will do, Germany makes a last appeal ... I trust this great Empire will not hesitate for a moment to respond to that appeal and to use all its diplomatic power and influence to support her, and to prevent a calamity which would be infinitely more dangerous to Europe and the world than was the downfall of Russia six or seven years ago.”  Having thus lined Britain up in diplomatic opposition to France, Smuts continued with advice against applying generosity to the latter country on the question of French war debts, warning that this would only encourage “French militarism.”

Do not let us from mistaken motives of generosity lend our aid to the further militarization of the European continent.  People here are already beginning to be seriously alarmed about French armaments on land and in the air.  In addition to these armaments, the French government have also lent large sums to the smaller European States around Germany, mainly with a view to feeding their ravenous military appetites.  There is a serious danger lest a policy of excessive generosity on our part, or on the part of America, may simply have the effect of enabling France still more effectively to subsidize and foster militarism on the Continent. ... If things continue on the present lines, this country may soon have to start rearming herself in sheer self-defence.

This speech of Smuts covers so adequately the point of view of the Milner Group in the early period of appeasement that no further quotations are necessary.  No real change occurred in the point of view of the Group from 1920 to 1938, not even as a result of the death of democratic hopes in Germany at the hands of the Nazis.  From Smuts’s speech of October 1923 before the South African Luncheon Club to Smuts’s speech of November 1934 before the RIIA, much water flowed in the river of international affairs, but the ideas of the Milner Group remained rigid and, it may be added, erroneous.  Just as the speech of 1923 may be taken as the culmination of the revisionist sentiment of the Group in the first five years of peace, so the speech of 1934 may be taken as the initiation of the appeasement sentiment of the Group in the last five years of peace.  The speeches could almost be interchanged.  We may call one revisionist and the other appeasing, but the point of view, the purpose, the method is the same.  These speeches will be mentioned again later.

The aim of the Milner Group through the period from 1920 to 1938 was the same:  to maintain the balance of power in Europe by building up Germany against France and Russia;  to increase Britain’s weight in that balance by aligning with her the Dominions and the United States;  to refuse any commitments (especially any commitments through the League of Nations, and above all any commitments to aid France) beyond those existing in 1919;  to keep British freedom of action;  to drive Germany eastward against Russia if either or both of these two powers became a threat to the peace of Western Europe.

The sabotage of the peace settlement by the Milner Group can be seen best in respect to reparations and the League of Nations.  In regard to the former, their argument appeared on two fronts:  in the first place, the reparations were too large because they were a dishonorable violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement;  and, in the second place, any demand for immediate or heavy payments in reparation would ruin Germany’s international credit and her domestic economic system, to the jeopardy of all reparation payments immediately and of all social order in Central Europe in the long run.

The argument against reparations as a violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement can be found in the volumes of Zimmern and Brand already mentioned.  Both concentrated their objections on the inclusion of pension payments by the victors to their own soldiers in the total reparation bill given to the Germans.  This was, of course, an obvious violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement, which bound the Germans to pay only for damage to civilian property.  Strangely enough, it was a member of the Group, Jan Smuts, who was responsible for the inclusion of the objectionable items, although he put them in not as a member of the Group, but as a South African politician.  This fact alone should have prevented him from making his speech of October 1923.  However, love of consistency has never prevented Smuts from making a speech.

From 1921 onward, the Milner Group and the British government (if the two policies are distinguishable) did all they could to lighten the reparations burden on Germany and to prevent France from using force to collect reparations.  The influence of the Milner Group on the government in this field may perhaps be indicated by the identity of the two policies.  It might also be pointed out that a member of the Group, Arthur (now Sir Arthur) Salter, was general secretary of the Reparations Commission from 1920 to 1922.  Brand was financial adviser to the chairman of the Supreme Economic Council (Lord Robert Cecil) in 1919;  he was vice-president of the Brussels Conference of 1920;  and he was the financial representative of South Africa at the Genoa Conference of 1922 (named by Smuts).  He was also a member of the International Committee of Experts on the Stabilization of the German Mark in 1922.  Hankey was British secretary at the Genoa Conference of 1922 and at the London Reparations Conference of 1924.  He was general secretary of the Hague Conference of 1929-1930 (which worked out the detailed application of the Young Plan) and of the Lausanne Conference (which ended reparations).

On the two great plans to settle the reparations problem, the Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Young Plan of 1929, the chief influence was that of J.P. Morgan and Company, but the Milner Group had half of the British delegation on the former committee.  The British members of the Dawes Committee were two in number:  Sir Robert Molesworth (now Lord) Kindersley,.and Sir Josiah (later Lord) Stamp.  The former was chairman of the board of directors of Lazard Brothers and Company.  Of this firm, Brand was a partner and managing director for many years.  The instigation for the formation of this committee came chiefly from the parliamentary agitations of H.A.L. Fisher and John Simon in the early months of 1923.

The Milner Group was outraged at the efforts of France to compel Germany to pay reparations.  Indeed, they were outraged at the whole policy of France:  reparations, the French alliances in Eastern Europe, the disarmament of Germany, French “militarism,” the French desire for an alliance with Britain, and the French desire for a long-term occupation of the Rhineland.  These six things were listed in The Round Table of March 1922 as “the Poincaré system.”  The journal then continued:  “The Poincaré system, indeed, is hopeless.  It leads inevitably to fresh war, for it is incredible that a powerful and spirited people like the Germans will be content to remain forever meekly obeying every flourish of Marshal Foch’s sword.”  Earlier, the reader was informed:  “The system is impracticable.  It assumes that the interests of Poland and the Little Entente are the same as those of France. ... It forgets that the peoples of Europe cannot balance their budgets and recover prosperity unless they cut down their expenditures on armaments to a minimum.... It ignores the certainty that British opinion can no more tolerate a French military hegemony over Europe than it could a German or Napoleonic, with its menace to freedom and democracy everywhere.”

When the French, in January 1923, occupied the Ruhr in an effort to force Germany to pay reparations, the rage of the Milner Group almost broke its bounds.  In private, and in the anonymity of The Round Table, they threatened economic and diplomatic retaliation, although in public speeches, such as in Parliament, they were more cautious.  However, even in public Fisher, Simon, and Smuts permitted their real feelings to become visible.

In the March 1923 issue The Round Table suggested that the reparations crisis and the Ruhr stalemate could be met by the appointment of a committee of experts (including Americans) to report on Germany’s capacity to pay reparations.  It announced that H.A.L. Fisher would move an amendment to the address to this effect in Parliament.  This amendment was moved by Fisher on 19 February 1923, before The Round Table in question appeared, in the following terms:

That this House do humbly represent to your Majesty that, inasmuch as the future peace of Europe cannot be safeguarded nor the recovery of.reparations be promoted by the operations of the French and Belgian Governments in the Ruhr, it is urgently necessary to seek effective securities against aggression by international guarantees under the League of Nations, and to invite the Council of the League without delay to appoint a Commission of Experts to report upon the capacity of Germany to pay reparations and upon the best method of effecting such payments, and that, in view of the recent indication of willingness on the part of the Government of the United States of America to participate in a Conference to this end, the British representatives on the Council of the League should be instructed to urge that an invitation be extended to the American government to appoint experts to serve upon the Commission.

This motion had, of course, no chance whatever of passing, and Fisher had no expectation that it would.  It was merely a propaganda device.  Two statements in it are noteworthy.  One was the emphasis an American participation, which was to be expected from the Milner Group.  But more important than this was the thinly veiled threat to France contained in the words “it is urgently necessary to seek effective securities against aggression by international guarantees.”  This clause referred to French aggression and was the seed from which emerged, three years later, the Locarno Pacts.  There were also some significant phrases, or slips of the tongue, in the speech which Fisher made in support of his motion.  For example, he used the word “we” in a way that apparently referred to the Milner Group;  and he spoke of “liquidation of the penal clauses of the Treaty of Versailles” as if that were the purpose of the committee he was seeking.  He said:  “We are anxious to get the amount of the reparation payment settled by an impartial tribunal.  We propose that it should be remitted to the League of Nations. ... But I admit that I have always had a considerable hesitation in asking the League of Nations to undertake the liquidation of the penal clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.... It is an integral part of this Amendment that the Americans should be brought in.”  Lord Robert Cecil objected to the amendment on the ground that its passage would constitute a censure of the government and force it to resign.  John Simon then spoke in support of the motion.  He said that France would never agree to any reparations figure, because she did not want the reparations clauses fulfilled, since that would make necessary the evacuation of the Rhineland.  France went into the Ruhr, he said, not to collect reparations, but to cripple Germany;  France was spending immense sums of money on military occupation and armaments but still was failing to pay either the principal or interest on her debt to Britain.

When put to a vote, the motion was defeated, 305 to 196.  In the majority were Ormsby-Gore, Edward Wood, Amery, three Cecils (Robert, Evelyn, and Hugh), two Astors (John and Nancy), Samuel Hoare, Eustace Percy, and Lord Wolmer.  In the minority were Fisher, Simon, and Arthur Salter.

By March, Fisher and Simon were more threatening to France.  On the sixth of that month, Fisher said in the House of Commons:  “I can only suggest this, that the Government make it clear to France, Germany, and the whole world that they regard this present issue between France and Germany, not as an issue affecting two nations, but as an issue affecting the peace and prosperity of the whole world.  We should keep before ourselves steadily the idea of an international solution.  We should work for it with all our power, and we should make it clear to France that an attempt to effect a separate solution of this question could not be considered otherwise than as an unfriendly act.”  Exactly a week later, John Simon, in a parliamentary maneuver, made a motion to cut the appropriation bill for the Foreign Office by £100 and seized the opportunity to make a violent attack on the actions of France.  He was answered by Eustace Percy, who in turn was answered by Fisher.

In this way the Group tried to keep the issue before the minds of the British public and to prepare the way for the Dawes settlement.  The Round Table, appealing to a somewhat different public, kept up a similar barrage.  In the June 1923 issue, and again in September, it condemned the occupation of the Ruhr.  In the former it suggested a three-part program as follows:  (1) find out what Germany can pay, by an expert committee’s investigation;  (2) leave Germany free to work and produce, by an immediate evacuation of the Rhineland [!! my italics];  and (3) protect France and Germany from each other [another hint about the future Locarno Pacts].  This program, according to The Round Table, should be imposed on France with the threat that if France did not accept it, Britain would withdraw from the Rhineland and Reparations Commissions and formally terminate the Entente.  It concluded:  “The Round Table has not hesitated in recent months to suggest that [British] neutrality ... was an attitude inconsistent either with the honour or the interests of the British Commonwealth.”  The Round Table even went so far as to say that the inflation in Germany was caused by the burden of reparations.  In the September 1923 issue it said (probably by the pen of Brand):  “In the last two years it is not inflation which has brought down the mark;  the printing presses have been engaged in a vain attempt to follow the depreciation of the currency.  That depreciation has been a direct consequence of the world’s judgment that the Allied claims for reparation were incapable of being met.  It will continue until that judgment, or in other words, those claims are revised.”

In October 1923, Smuts, who was in London for the Imperial Conference and was in close contact with the Group, made speeches in which he compared the French occupation of the Ruhr with the German attack on Belgium in 1914 and said that Britain “may soon have to start rearming herself in sheer self-defence” against French militarism.  John Dove, writing to Brand in a private letter, found an additional argument against France in the fact that her policy was injuring democracy in Germany.  He wrote:

It seems to me that the most disastrous effect of Poincaré’s policy would be the final collapse of democracy in Germany, the risk of which has been pointed out in The Round Table.  The irony of the whole situation is that if the Junkers should capture the Reich again, the same old antagonisms will revive and we shall find ourselves willy-nilly, lined up again with France to avert a danger which French action has again called into being. ... Even if Smuts follows up his fine speech, the situation may have changed so much before the Imperial Conference is over that people who think like him and us may find ourselves baffled.... I doubt if we shall again have as good a chance of getting a peaceful democracy set up in Germany.

After the Dawes Plan went into force, the Milner Group’s policies continued to be followed by the British government.  The “policy of fulfillment” pursued by Germany under Stresemann was close to the heart of the Group.  In fact, there is a certain amount of evidence that the Group was in a position to reach Stresemann and advise him to follow this policy.  This was done through Smuts and Lord D’Abernon.

There is little doubt that the Locarno Pacts were designed in the Milner Group and were first brought into public notice by Stresemann, at the suggestion of Lord D’Abernon.

Immediately after Smuts made his speech against France in October 1923, he got in touch with Stresemann, presumably in connection with the South African Mandate in South-West Africa.  Smuts himself told the story to Mrs. Millen, his authorized biographer, in these words:

I was in touch with them [the Germans] in London over questions concerning German South West.  They had sent a man over from their Foreign Office to see me.^{[4 ]} I can’t say the Germans have behaved very well about German South-West, but that is another matter.  Well, naturally, my speech meant something to this fellow.  The English were hating the Ruhr business;  it was turning them from France to Germany, the whole English-speaking world was hating it.  Curzon, in particular, was hating it.  Yet very little was being done to express all this feeling.  I took it upon myself to express the feeling.  I acted, you understand, unofficially.  I consulted no one.  But I could see my action would not be abhorrent to the Government—would, in fact, be a relief to them.  When the German from the Foreign Office came to me full of what this sort of attitude would mean to Stresemann I told him I was speaking only for myself.  “But you can see,” I said, “that the people here approve of my speech.  If my personal advice is any use to you, I would recommend the Germans to give up their policy of non-cooperation, to rely on the goodwill of the world and make a sincere advance towards the better understanding which I am sure can be brought about.”  I got in touch with Stresemann.  Our correspondence followed those lines.  You will remember that Stresemann’s policy ended in the Dawes Plan and the Pact of Locarno and that he got the Nobel Peace for this work !”

In this connection it is worthy of note that the German Chancellor, at a Cabinet meeting on 12 November 1923, quoted Smuts by name as the author of what he (Stresemann) considered the proper road out of the crisis.

Lord D’Abernon was not a member of the Milner Group.  He was, however, a member of the Cecil Bloc’s second generation and had been, at one time, a rather casual member of “The Souls.”  This, it will be recalled, was the country-house set in which George Curzon, Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton, St. John Brodrick, and the Tennant sisters were the chief figures.  Born Edgar Vincent, he was made Baron D’Abernon in 1914 by Asquith who was also a member of “The Souls” and married Margot Tennant in 1894.  D’Abernon joined the Coldstream Guards in 1877 after graduating from Eton, but within a few years was helping Lord Salisbury to unravel the aftereffects of the Congress of Berlin.  By 1880 he was private secretary to Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, brother of Lord Lansdowne and Commissioner for European Turkey.  The following year he was assistant to the British Commissioner for Evacuation of the Territory ceded to Greece by Turkey.  In 1882 he was the British, Belgian, and Dutch representative on the Council of the Ottoman Public Debt, and soon became president of that Council.  From 1883 to 1889 he was financial adviser to the Egyptian government and from 1889 to 1897 was governor of the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Constantinople.  In Salisbury’s third administration he was a Conservative M.P. for Exeter (1899-1906).  The next few years were devoted to private affairs in international banking circles close to Milner.  In 1920 he was the British civilian member of the “Weygand mission to Warsaw.”  This mission undoubtedly had an important influence on his thinking.  As a chief figure in Salisbury’s efforts to bolster up the Ottoman Empire against Russia, D’Abernon had always been anti-Russian.  In this respect, his background was like Curzon’s.  As a result of the Warsaw mission, D’Abernon’s anti-Russian feeling was modified to an anti-Bolshevik one of much greater intensity.  To him the obvious solution seemed to be to build up Germany as a military bulwark against the Soviet Union.  He said as much in a letter of 11 August 1920 to Sir Maurice Hankey.  This letter, printed by D’Abernon in his book on the Battle of Warsaw (The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World, published 1931), suggests that “a good bargain might be made with the German military leaders in co-operating against the Soviet.”  Shortly afterwards, D’Abernon was made British Ambassador at Berlin.  At the time, it was widely rumored and never denied that he had been appointed primarily to obtain some settlement of the reparations problem, it being felt that his wide experience in international public finance would qualify him for this work.  This may have been so, but his prejudices likewise qualified him for only one solution to the problem, the one desired by the Germans.^[5]

In reaching this solution, D’Abernon acted as the intermediary among Stresemann, the German Chancellor;  Curzon, the Foreign Secretary;  and, apparently, Kindersley, Brand’s associate at Lazard Brothers.  According to Harold Nicolson in his book Curzon:  The Last Phase (1934), “The initial credit for what proved the ultimate solution belongs, in all probability, to Lord D’Abernon—one of the most acute and broad-minded diplomatists which this country has ever possessed.”  In the events leading up to Curzon’s famous note to France of 11 August 1923, the note which contended that the Ruhr occupation could not be justified under the Treaty of Versailles, D’Abernon played an important role both in London and in Berlin.  In his Diary of an Ambassador, D’Abernon merely listed the notes between Curzon and France and added:  “Throughout this controversy Lord D’Abernon had been consulted.”

During his term as Ambassador in Berlin, D’Abernon’s policy was identical with that of the Milner Group, except for the shading that he was more anti-Soviet and less anti-French and was more impetuous in his desire to tear up the Treaty of Versailles in favor of Germany.  This last distinction rested on the fact that D’Abernon was ready to appease Germany regardless of whether it were democratic or not;  indeed, he did not regard democracy as either necessary or good for Germany.  The Milner Group, until 1929, was still in favor of a democratic Germany, because they realized better than D’Abernon the danger to civilization from an undemocratic Germany.  It took the world depression and its resulting social unrest to bring the Milner Group around to the view which D’Abernon held as early as 1920, that appeasement to an undemocratic Germany could be used as a weapon against “social disorder.”

Brigadier General J.H. Morgan, whom we have already quoted, makes perfectly clear that D’Abernon was one of the chief obstacles in the path of the Interallied Commission’s efforts to force Germany to disarm.  In 1920, when von Seeckt, Commander of the German Army, sought modifications of the disarmament rules which would have permitted large-scale evasion of their provisions, General Morgan found it impossible to get his dissenting reports accepted in London.  He wrote in Assize of Arms:  “At the eleventh hour I managed to get my reports on the implications of von Seeckt’s plan brought to the direct notice of Mr. Lloyd George through the agency of my friend Philip Kerr who, after reading these reports, advised the Prime Minister to reject von Seeckt’s proposals.  Rejected they were at the Conference of Spa in July 1920, as we shall see, but von Seeckt refused to accept defeat and fell back on a second move.”  When, in 1921, General Morgan became “gravely disturbed” at the evasions of German disarmament, he wrote a memorandum on the subject.  It was suppressed by Lord D’Abernon.  Morgan added in his book:  “I was not altogether surprised.  Lord D’Abernon was the apostle of appeasement.”  In January 1923, this “apostle of appeasement” forced the British delegation on the Disarmament Commission to stop all inspection operations in Germany.  They were never resumed, although the Commission remained in Germany for four more years, and the French could do nothing without the British members.^[6]

Throughout 1923 and 1924, D’Abernon put pressure on both the German and the British governments to pursue a policy on the reparations question which was identical with that which Smuts was advocating at the same time and in the same quarters.  He put pressure on the British government to follow this policy on the grounds that any different policy would lead to Stresemann’s fall from office.  This would result in a very dangerous situation, according to D’Abernon (and Stresemann), where Germany might fall into the control of either the extreme left or the extreme right.  For example, a minute of a German Cabinet meeting of 2 November 1923, found by Eric Sutton among Stresemann’s papers and published by him, said in part:  “To the English Ambassador, who made some rather anxious enquiries, Stresemann stated that the maintenance of the state of siege was absolutely essential in view of the risk of a Putsch both from the Left and from the Right.  He would use all his efforts to preserve the unity of the Reich. ... Lord D’Abernon replied that his view, which was shared in influential quarters in London, was that Stresemann was the only man who could steer the German ship of State through the present troubled waters.”  Among the quarters in London which shared this view, we find the Milner Group.

The settlement which emerged from the crisis, the Dawes Plan and the evacuation of the Ruhr, was exactly what the Milner Group wanted.  From that point on to the banking crisis of 1931, their satisfaction continued.  In the years 1929-1931 they clearly had no direct influence on affairs, chiefly because a Labour government was in office in London, but their earlier activities had so predetermined the situation that it continued to develop in the direction they wished.  After the banking crisis of 1931, the whole structure of international finance with which the Group had been so closely associated disappeared and, after a brief period of doubt, was replaced by a rapid growth of monopolistic national capitalism.  This was accepted by the Milner Group with hardly a break in stride.  Hichens had been deeply involved in monopolistic heavy industry for a quarter of a century in 1932.  Milner had advocated a system of “national capitalism” with “industrial self-regulation” behind tariff walls even earlier.  Amery and others had accepted much of this as a method, although they did not necessarily embrace Milner’s rather socialistic goals.  As a result, in the period 1931-1933, the Milner Group willingly liquidated reparations, war debts, and the whole structure of international capitalism, and embraced protection and cartels instead.

Parallel with their destruction of reparations, and in a much more direct fashion, the Milner Group destroyed collective security through the League of Nations.  The Group never intended that the League of Nations should be used to achieve collective security.  They never intended that sanctions, either military or economic, should be used to force any aggressive power to keep the peace or to enforce any political decision which might be reached by international agreement.  This must be understood at the beginning.  The Milner Group never intended that the League should be used as an instrument of collective security or that sanctions should be used as an instrument by the League.  From the beginning, they expected only two things from the League:  (1) that it could be used as a center for international cooperation in international administration in nonpolitical matters, and (2) that it could be used as a center for consultation in political matters.  In regard to the first point, the Group regarded the League as a center for such activities as those previously exercised through the International Postal Union.  In all such activities as this, each state would retain full sovereignty and would cooperate only on a completely voluntary basis in fields of social importance.  In regard to the second point (political questions), no member of the Group had any intention of any state yielding any sliver of its full sovereignty to the League.  The League was merely an agreement, like any treaty, by which each state bound itself to confer together in a crisis and not make war within three months of the submission of the question to consultation.  The whole purpose of the League was to delay action in a crisis by requiring this period for consultation.  There was no restriction on action after the three months.  There was some doubt, within the Group, as to whether sanctions could be used to compel a state to observe the three months’ delay.  Most of the members of the Group said “no” to this question.  A few said that economic sanctions could be used.  Robert Cecil, at the beginning, at least, felt that political sanctions might be used to compel a state to keep the peace for the three months, but by 1922 every member of the Group had abandoned both political and economic sanctions for enforcing the three months’ delay.  There never was within the Group any intention at any time to use sanctions for any other purpose, such as keeping peace after the three-month period.

This, then, was the point of view of the Milner Group in 1919, as in 1939.  Unfortunately, in the process of drawing up the Covenant of the League in 1919, certain phrases or implications were introduced into the document, under pressure from France, from Woodrow Wilson, and from other groups in Britain, which could be taken to indicate that the League might have been intended to be used as a real instrument of collective security, that it might have involved some minute limitation of state sovereignty, that sanctions might under certain circumstances be used to protect the peace.  As soon as these implications became clear, the Group’s ardor for the League began to evaporate.  When the United States refused to join the League, this dwindling ardor turned to hatred.  Nevertheless, the Group did not abandon the League at this point.  On the contrary, they tightened their grip on it—in order to prevent any “foolish” persons from using the vague implications of the Covenant in an effort to make the League an instrument of collective security.  The Group were determined that if any such effort as this were made, they would prevent it and, if necessary, destroy the League to prevent it.  Only they would insist, in such a case, that the League was destroyed not by them but by the persons who tried to use it as an instrument of collective security.

All of this may sound extreme.  Unfortunately, it is not extreme.  That this was what the Group did to the League is established beyond doubt in history.  That the Group intended to do this is equally beyond dispute.  The evidence is conclusive.

The British ideas on the League and the British drafts of the Covenant were formed by four men, all close to the Milner Group.  They were Lord Robert Cecil, General Smuts, Lord Phillimore, and Alfred Zimmern.  For drafting documents they frequently used Cecil Hurst, a close associate, but not a member, of the Group.  Hurst (Sir Cecil since 1920) was assistant legal adviser to the Foreign Office in 1902-1918, legal adviser in 1918-1929, a judge on the Permanent Court of International justice at The Hague in 1929-1946, and Chairman of the United Nations War Crimes Commission in 1943-1944.  He was the man responsible for the verbal form of Articles 10-16 (the sanction articles) of the Covenant of the League of Nations, for the Articles of Agreement with Ireland in 1921, and for the wording of the Locarno Pact in 1925.  He frequently worked closely with the Milner Group.  For example, in 1921 he was instrumental in making an agreement by which the British Yearbook of International Law, of which he was editor, was affiliated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs.  At the time, he and Curtis were working together on the Irish agreement.

As early as 1916, Lord Robert Cecil was trying to persuade the Cabinet to support a League of Nations.  This resulted in the appointment of the Phillimore Committee, which drew up the first British draft for the Covenant.  As a result, in 1918-1919 Lord Robert became the chief government spokesman for a League of Nations and the presumed author of the second British draft.  The real author of this second draft was Alfred Zimrrrern.  Cecil and Zimmern were both dubious of any organization that would restrict state sovereignty.  On 12 November 1918, the day after the armistice, Lord Robert made a speech at Birmingham on the type of League he expected.  That speech shows clearly that he had little faith in the possibility of disarmament and none in international justice or military sanctions to preserve the peace.  The sovereignty of each state was left intact.  As W.E. Rappard (director of the Graduate School of International Studies at Geneva) wrote in International Conciliation in June 1927, “He [Lord Cecil] was very sceptical about the possibility of submitting vital international questions to the judgment of courts of law and `confessed to the gravest doubts’ as to the practicability of enforcing the decrees of such courts by any `form of international force.’ On the other hand, he firmly believed in the efficacy of economic pressure as a means of coercing a country bent on aggression in violation of its pacific agreements.”  It might be remarked in passing that the belief that economic sanctions could be used without a backing of military force, or the possibility of needing such backing, is the one sure sign of a novice in foreign politics, and Robert Cecil could never be called a novice in such matters.  In the speech itself he said: 

The most important step we can now take is to devise machinery which, in case of international dispute, will, at the least, delay the outbreak of war, and secure full and open discussion of the causes of the quarrel.  For that purpose ... all that would be necessary would be a treaty binding the signatories never to wage war themselves or permit others to wage war till a formal conference of nations had been held to enquire into, and, if possible, decide the dispute.  It is probably true, at least in theory, that decisions would be difficult to obtain, for the decisions of such a conference, like all other international proceedings, would have to be unanimous to be binding.  But since the important thing is to secure delay and open discussion, that is to say, time to enable public opinion to act and information to instruct it, this is not a serious objection to the proposal.  Indeed, from one point of view, it is an advantage, since it avoids any interference with national sovereignty except the interposition of a delay in seeking redress by force of arms.  This is the essential thing.... To that extent, and to that extent only, international coercion would be necessary.

This speech of Cecil’s was approved by The Round Table and accepted as its own point of view in the issue of December 1918.  At the same time, through Smuts, the Milner Group published another statement of its views.  This pamphlet, called The League of Nations, a Practical Suggestion, was released in December 1918, after having been read in manuscript and criticized by the inner circle, especially Curtis.  This statement devoted most of its effort to the use of mandates for captured German colonies.  For preserving the peace, it had considerable faith in compulsory arbitration and hoped to combine this with widespread disarmament.

The Group’s own statement on this subject appeared in the December 1918 issue of The Round Table in an article called “Windows of Freedom,” written by Curtis.  He pointed out that British seapower had twice saved civilization and any proposal that it should be used in the future only at the request of the League of Nations must be emphatically rejected.  The League would consist of fallible human beings, and England could never yield her decision to them.  He continued:  “Her own existence and that of the world’s freedom are inseparably connected. ... To yield it without a blow is to yield the whole citadel in which the forces that make for human freedom are entrenched;  to covenant to yield it is to bargain a betrayal of the world in advance. ... [The League must not be a world government.] If the burden of a world government is placed on it it will fall with a crash.”  He pointed out it could be a world government only if it represented peoples and not states, and if it had the power to tax those peoples.  It should simply be an interstate conference of the world.

The Peace Conference ... cannot hope to produce a written constitution for the globe or a genuine government of mankind.  What it can do is establish a permanent annual conference between foreign ministers themselves, with a permanent secretariat, in which, as at the Peace Conference itself, all questions at issue between States can be discussed and, if possible, settled by agreement.  Such a conference cannot itself govern the world, still less those portions of mankind who cannot yet govern themselves.  But it can act as a symbol and organ of the human conscience, however imperfect, to which real governments of existing states can be made answerable for facts which concern the world at large.”

In another article in the same issue of The Round Table (“Some Principles and Problems of the Settlement,” December 1918), similar ideas were expressed even more explicitly by Zimmern.  He stated that the League of Nations should be called the League of States, or the interstate Conference, for sovereign states would be its units, and it would make not laws but contracts.  “The League of Nations, in fact, so far from invalidating or diminishing national sovereignty, should strengthen and increase it.... The work before the coming age is not to supersede the existing States but to moralize them.... Membership must be restricted to those states where authority is based upon the consent of the people over whom it is exercised ... the reign of law.... It can reasonably be demanded that no States should be admitted which do not make such a consummation one of the deliberate aims of their policy.”  Under this idea, The Round Table excluded by name from the new League, Liberia, Mexico, “and above all Russia.”  “The League,” it continued, “will not simply be a League of States, it will be a League of Commonwealths.”  As its hopes in the League dwindled, The Round Table became less exclusive, and, in June 1919, it declared, “without Germany or Russia the League of Nations will be dangerously incomplete.”

In the March 1919 issue, The Round Table described in detail the kind of League it wanted— “a common clearing house for non-contentious business.”  Its whole basis was to be “public opinion,” and its organization was to be that of “an assembly point of bureaucrats of various countries” about an international secretariat and various organizations like the International Postal Union or the International Institute of Agriculture.

Every great department of government in each country whose activities touch those of similar departments in other countries should have its recognized delegates on a permanent international commission charged with the study of the sphere of international relations in question and with the duty of making recommendations to their various Governments. ... Across the street, as it were, from these permanent Bureaux, at the capital of the League, there should be another central permanent Bureau ... an International secretariat.... They must not be national ambassadors, but civil servants under the sole direction of a non-national chancellor;  and the aim of the whole organization ... must be to evolve a practical international sense, a sense of common service.

This plan regarded the Council of the League as the successor of the Supreme War Council, made up of premiers and foreign ministers, and the instrument for dealing with political questions in a purely consultative way.  Accordingly, the Council would consist only of the Great Powers.

These plans for the Covenant of the League of Nations were rudely shattered at the Peace Conference when the French demanded that the new organization be a “Super-state” with its own army and powers of action.  The British were horrified, but with the help of the Americans were able to shelve this suggestion.  However, to satisfy the demand from their own delegations as well as the French, they spread a camouflage of sham world government over the structure they had planned.  This was done by Cecil Hurst.  Hurst visited David Hunter Miller, the American legal expert, one night and persuaded him to replace the vital clauses 10 to 16 with drafts drawn up by Hurst.  These drafts were deliberately drawn with loopholes so that no aggressor need ever be driven to the point where sanctions would have to be applied.  This was done by presenting alternative paths of action leading toward sanctions, some of them leading to economic sanctions, but one path, which could be freely chosen by the aggressor, always available, leading to a loophole where no collective action would be possible.  The whole procedure was concealed beneath a veil of legalistic terminology so that the Covenant could be presented to the public as a watertight document, but Britain could always escape from the necessity to apply sanctions through a loophole.

In spite of this, the Milner Group were very dissatisfied.  They tried simultaneously to do three things:  (1) to persuade public opinion that the League was a wonderful instrument of international co-operation designed to keep the peace;  (2) to criticize the Covenant for the “traces of a sham world-government” which had been thrown over it;  and (3) to reassure themselves and the ruling groups in England, the Dominions, and the United States that the League was not “a world-state.”  All of this took a good deal of neat footwork, or, more accurately, nimble tongues and neat pen work.  More double-talk and double-writing were emitted by the Milner Group on this subject in the two decades 1919-1939 than was issued by any other group on this subject in the period.

Among themselves the Group did not conceal their disappointment with the Covenant because it went too far.  In the June 1919 issue of The Round Table they said reassuringly:  “The document is not the Constitution of a Super-state, but, as its title explains, a solemn agreement between Sovereign States which consent to limit their complete freedom of action on certain points.... The League must continue to depend on the free consent, in the last resort, of its component States;  this assumption is evident in nearly every article of the Covenant, of which the ultimate and most effective sanction must be the public opinion of the civilized world.  If the nations of the future are in the main selfish, grasping, and bellicose, no instrument or machinery will restrain them.”  But in the same issue we read the complaint:  “In the Imperial Conference Sir Wilfrid Laurier was never tired of saying, 'This is not a Government, but a conference of Governments with Governments.’ It is a pity that there was no one in Paris to keep on saying this.  For the Covenant is still marked by the traces of sham government.”

By the March 1920 issue, the full bitterness of the Group on this last point became evident.  It said:  “The League has failed to secure the adhesion of one of its most important members, The United States, and is very unlikely to secure it. ... This situation presents a very serious problem for the British Empire.  We have not only undertaken great obligations under the League which we must now both in honesty and in self-regard revise, but we have looked to the League to provide us with the machinery for United British action in foreign affairs.” (my italics;  this is the cat coming out of the bag).  The article continued with criticism of Wilson, and praise of the Republican Senate’s refusal to swallow the League as it stood.  It then said:

The vital weakness of the Treaty and the Covenant became more clear than ever in the months succeeding the signature at Versailles.  A settlement based on ideal principles and poetic justice can be permanently applied and maintained only by a world government to which all nations will subordinate their private interests.... It demands, not only that they should sacrifice their private interests to this world-interest, but also that they should be prepared to enforce the claims of world-interest even in matters where their own interests are in no wise engaged.  It demands, in fact, that they should subordinate their national sovereignty to an international code and an international ideal.  The reservations of the American Senate ... point the practical difficulties of this ideal with simple force.  All the reservations ... are affirmations of the sovereign right of the American people to make their own policy without interference from an International League. ... None of these reservations, it should be noted, contravenes the general aims of the League;  but they are, one and all, directed to ensure that no action is taken in pursuit of those aims except with the consent and approval of the Congress. ... There is nothing peculiar in this attitude.  It is merely, we repeat, the broad reflex of an attitude already taken up by all the European Allies in questions where their national interests are affected, and also by the British Dominions in their relations with the British Government.  It gives us a statement in plain English, of the limitations to the ideal of international action which none of the other Allies will, in practice, dispute.  So far, therefore, from destroying the League of Nations, the American reservations have rendered it the great service of pointing clearly to the flaws which at present neutralize its worth.

Among these flaws, in the opinion of the Milner Group, was the fact that their plan to use the League of Nations as a method of tying the Dominions more closely to the United Kingdom had failed and, instead, the Covenant

gave the Dominions the grounds, or rather the excuse, to avoid closer union with the United Kingdom.... It had been found in Paris that in order to preserve its unity the British delegation must meet frequently as a delegation to discuss its policy before meeting the representatives of foreign nations in conference.  How was this unity of action to be maintained after the signature of peace without committing the Dominion Governments to some new constitutional organization within the Commonwealth?  And if some new constitutional organization were to be devised for this purpose, how could it fail to limit in some way the full national independent status which the Dominion Governments had just achieved by their recognition as individual members of the League of Nations?  The answer to these questions was found in cooperation within the League, which was to serve, not only as the link between the British Empire and foreign Powers, but as the link also between the constituent nations of the British Empire itself.  Imbued with this idea, the Dominion statesmen accepted obligations to foreign Powers under the Covenant of the League more binding than any obligations which they would undertake to their kindred nations within the British Empire.  In other words, they mortgaged their freedom of action to a league of foreign States in order to avoid the possibility of mortgaging it to the British Government.  It hardly required the reservations of the American Senate to demonstrate the illusory character of this arrangement. ... The British Dominions have made no such reservations with regard to the Covenant, and they are therefore bound by the obligations which have been rejected by the United States.  Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand are, in fact, bound by stronger written obligations to Poland and Czechoslovakia, than to the British Isles. ... It is almost needless to observe that none of the democracies of the British Empire has grasped the extent of its obligations to the League of Nations or would hesitate to repudiate them at once, if put to the test.  If England were threatened by invasion, the other British domocracies would mobilize at once for her support;  but though they have a written obligation to Poland, which they have never dreamed of giving to England, they would not in practice mobilise a single man to defend the integrity of the Corridor to Danzig or any other Polish territorial interest.... This is a dangerous and equivocal situation. ... It is time that our democracies reviewed and corrected it with the clearness of vision and candour of statement displayed by the much-abused Senate of the United States.... To what course of action do these conclusions point?  They point in the first place to revision of our obligations under the League.  We are at present pledged to guarantees of territorial arrangements in Europe which may be challenged at any time by forces too powerful for diplomatic control, and it is becoming evident that in no part of the Empire would public opinion sanction our active interference in the local disputes which may ensue.  The Polish Corridor to Danzig is a case in point.... Our proper course is to revise and restate our position towards the League in accordance with these facts.... First, we wish to do our utmost to guarantee peace, liberty, and law throughout the world without committing ourselves to quixotic obligations to foreign States.  Second, we wish to assist and develop the simple mechanism of international dealing embodied in the League without mortgaging our freedom of action and judgment under an international Covenant.  Our policy toward the League should, therefore, be revised on the following guiding lines:  1.  We should state definitely that our action within the League will be governed solely by our own judgment of every situation as it arises, and we must undertake no general obligations which we may not be able or willing, when the test comes, to discharge.  2.  We must in no case commit ourselves to responsibilities which we cannot discharge to the full with our own resources, independent of assistance from any foreign power.  3.  We must definitely renounce the idea that the League may normally enforce its opinions by military or economic pressure on the recalcitrant States.  It exists to bring principals together for open discussion of international difficulties, to extend and develop the mechanisms and habit of international co-operation, and to establish an atmosphere in which international controversies may be settled with fairness and goodwill. ... With the less ambitious objects defined above it will sooner or later secure the whole-hearted support of American opinion. ... The influence of the League of Nations upon British Imperial relations has for the moment been misleading and dangerous.... It is only a question of time before this situation leads to an incident of some kind which will provoke the bitterest recrimination and controversy. . .

In the leading article of the September 1920 issue, The Round Table took up the same problem and repeated many of its arguments.  It blamed Wilson for corrupting the Covenant into “a pseudo world-government” by adding sham decorations to a fundamentally different structure based on consultation of sovereign states.  Instead of the Covenant, it concluded, we should have merely continued the Supreme Council, which was working so well at Spa.

In spite of this complete disillusionment with the League, the Milner Group still continued to keep a firm grip on as much of it as Britain could control.  In the first hundred sessions of the Council of the League of Nations (1920-1938), thirty different persons sat as delegates for Britain.  Omitting the four who sat for Labour governments, we have twenty-six.  Of these, seven were from the Milner Group;  seven others were present at only one session and are of little significance.  The others were almost all from the Cecil Bloc close to the Milner Group.  The following list indicates the distribution.

Name | Sessions As Delegate
Anthony Eden 39
Sir John Simon 22
Sir Austen Chamberlain 20
Arthur Balfour 16
Lord Robert Cecil 15
Sir Alexander Cadogan 12
E.H. Carr 8
H.A.L. Fisher 7
Sir William Malkin 7
Viscount Cranborne 5
Lord Curzon 3
Lord Londonderry 3
Leopold Amery 2
Edward Wood (Lord Halifax) 2
Cecil Hurst 2
Sir Edward H. Young 2
Lord Cushendun 2
Lord Onslow 2
Gilbert Murray 1
Sir Rennell Rodd 1
Six others 1 each

At the annual meetings of the Assembly of the League, a somewhat similar situation existed.  The delegations had from three to eight members, with about half of the number being from the Milner Group, except when members of the Labour Party were present.  H.A.L. Fisher was a delegate in 1920, 1921, and 1922;  Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton was one in 1923, 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1931;  Lord Astor was one in 1931, 1936, and 1938;  Cecil Hurst was one in 1924, 1926, 1927, and 1928;  Gilbert Murray was one in 1924;  Lord Halifax was one in 1923 and 1936;  Ormsby-Gore was one in 1933;  Lord Robert Cecil was one in 1923, 1926, 1929, 1930, 1931, and 1932;  E.H. Carr was one in 1933 and 1934;  etc.  The Milner Group control was most complete at the crucial Twelfth Assembly (1931), when the delegation of five members consisted of Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Lytton, Lord Astor, Arthur Salter, and Mrs. Lyttelton.  In addition, the Group frequently had other members attached to the delegations as secretaries or substitutes.  Among these were E.H. Carr, A.L. Smith, and R.M. Makins.  Moreover, the Group frequently had members on the delegations from the Dominions.  The South African delegation in 1920 had Robert Cecil;  in 1921 it had Robert Cecil and Gilbert Murray;  in 1923 it had Smuts and Gilbert Murray.  The Australian delegation had Sir John Latham in 1926, while the Canadian delegation had Vincent Massey ten years later.  The Indian delegation had L.F. Rushbrook Williams in 1925.

The Milner Group was also influential in the Secretariat of the League.  Sir Eric Drummond (now sixteenth Earl of Perth), who had been Balfour’s private secretary from 1916 to 1919, was Secretary-General to the League from 1919 to 1933, when he resigned to become British Ambassador in Rome.  Not a member of the Group, he was nevertheless close to it.  Harold Butler, of the Group and of All Souls, was deputy director and director of the International Labor Office in the period 1920-1938.  Arthur Salter, of the Group and All Souls, was director of the Economic and Financial Section of the League in 1919-1920 and again in 1922-1931.  B.H. Sumner, of the Group and All Souls (now Warden), was on the staff of the ILO in 1920-1922.  R.M. Makins, of the Group and All Souls, was assistant adviser and adviser on League of Nations affairs to the Foreign Office in 1937-1939.

To build up public opinion in favor of the League of Nations, the Milner Group formed an organization known as the League of Nations Union.  In this organization the most active figures were Lord Robert Cecil, Gilbert Murray, the present Lord Esher, Mrs. Lyttelton, and Wilson Harris.  Lord Cecil was president from 1923 to 1945;  Professor Murray was chairman from 1923 to 1938 and co-president from 1938 to 1945;  Wilson Harris was its parliamentary secretary and editor of its paper, Headway, for many years.  Among others, C.A. Macartney, of All Souls and the RIIA, was head of the Intelligence Department from 1928 to 1936.  Harris and Macartney were late additions to the Group, the former becoming a member of the inner circle about 1922, while the latter became a member of the outer circle in the late 1920s, probably as a result of his association with the Encyclopedia Britannica as an expert on Central Europe.  Wilson Harris was one of the most intimate associates of Lionel Curtis, Philip Kerr, and other members of the inner core in the 1920s, and this association became closer, if possible, in the 1930s.  A graduate of Cambridge University in 1906, he served for many years in various capacities with the Daily News.  Since 1932 he has been editor of The Spectator, and since 1945 he has been a Member of Parliament from Cambridge University.  He was one of the most ardent advocates of appeasement in the period 1935-1939, especially in the meetings at Chatham House.  In this connection, it might be mentioned that he was a member of the council of the RIIA in 1924-1927.  He has written books on Woodrow Wilson, the peace settlement, the League of Nations, disarmament, etc.  His most recent work is a biography of J.A. Spender, one-time editor of the Westminster Gazette (1896-1922), which he and his brother founded in 1893 in collaboration with Edmund Garrett and Edward Cook, when all four left the Pall Mall Gazette after its purchase by Waldorf Astor.

The ability of the Milner Group to mobilize public opinion in regard to the League of Nations is almost beyond belief.  It was not a simple task, since they were simultaneously trying to do two things:  on the one hand, seeking to build up popular opinion in favor of the League so that its work could be done more effectively;  and, at the same time, seeking to prevent influential people from using the League as an instrument of world government before popular opinion was ready for a world government.  In general, The Round Table and The Times were used for the latter purpose, while the League of Nations Union and a strange assortment of outlets, such as Chatham House, Toynbee Hall, extension courses at Oxford, adult-education courses in London, International Conciliation in the United States, the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at Paris, the Geneva School of International Studies and the Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva, and the various branches of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, were used for the former purpose.  The Milner Group did not control all of these.  Their influence was strong in all of them, and, since the influence of J.P. Morgan and Company was also strong in most of them and since Morgan and the Group were pursuing a parallel policy on this issue, the Group were usually able to utilize the resources of these various organizations when they wished.

As examples of this, we might point out that Curtis and Kerr each gave a series of lectures at the Institute of Politics, Williamstown, in 1922.  Selections from these, along with an article from the September 1922 issue of The Round Table, were published in International Conciliation for February 1923.  Kerr and Lord Birkenhead spoke at the Institute in 1923;  Sir Arthur Willert, a close associate if not a member of the Group, spoke at the Institute of Politics in 1927.  Sir Arthur was always close to the Group.  He was a member of the staff of The Times from 1906 to 1921, chiefly as head of the Washington office;  he was in the Foreign Office as head of the News Department from 1921 to 1935, was on the United Kingdom delegation to the League of Nations in 1929-1934, was an important figure in the Ministry of Information (a Milner Group fief) in 1939-1945, and wrote a book called The Empire and the World in collaboration with H.V. Hodson and B.K. Long of the Kindergarten.

Other associates of the Group who spoke at the Institute of Politics at Williamstown were Lord Eustace Percy, who spoke on wartime shipping problems in 1929, and Lord Meston, who spoke on Indian nationalism in 1930.^[7]

The relationship between the Milner Group and the valuable little monthly publication called International Conciliation was exercised indirectly through the parallel group in America, which had been organized by the associates of J.P. Morgan and Company before the First World War, and which made its most intimate connections with the Milner Group at the Peace Conference of 1919.  We have already mentioned this American group in connection with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of Pacific Relations.  Through this connection, many of the activities and propaganda effusions of the Milner Group were made available to a wide public in America.  We have already mentioned the February 1923 issue of International Conciliation, which was monopolized by the Group.  A few other examples might be mentioned.  Both of General Smuts’s important speeches, that of 23 October 1923 and that of 13 November 1934, were reproduced in International Conciliation.  So too was an article on “The League and Minorities” by Wilson Harris.  This was in the September 1926 issue.  A Times editorial of 22 November 1926 on “The Empire as It Is” was reprinted in March 1927;  another of 14 July 1934 is in the September issue of the same year;  a third of 12 July 1935 is in the issue of September 1935.  Brand’s report on Germany’s Foreign Creditors’ Standstill Agreements is in the May issue of 1932;  while a long article from the same pen on “The Gold Problem” appears in the October 1937 issue.  This article was originally published, over a period of three days, in The Times in June 1937.  An article on Russia from The Round Table was reprinted in December 1929.  Lord Lothian’s speeches of 25 October 1939 and of 11 December 1940 were both printed in the issues of International Conciliation immediately following their delivery.  An article by Lothian called “League or No League,” first published in The Observer in August 1936, was reprinted in the periodical under consideration in December 1936.  An article by Lord Cecil on disarmament, another by Clarence Streit (one of the few American members of the Group) on the League of Nations, and a third by Stephen King-Hall on the Mediterranean problem were published in December 1932, February 1934, and January 1938 respectively.  A speech of John Simon’s appears in the issue of May 1935;  one of Samuel Hoare’s is in the September issue of the same year;  another by Samuel Hoare is in the issue of November 1935.  Needless to say, the activities of the Institute of Pacific Relations, of the Imperial Conferences, of the League of Nations, and of the various international meetings devoted to reparations and disarmament were adequately reflected in the pages of International Conciliation.

The deep dislike which the Milner Group felt for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations was shared by the French, but for quite opposite reasons.  The French felt insecure in the face of Germany because they realized that France had beaten Germany in 1918 only because of the happy fact that she had Russia, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States to help her.  From 1919 onward, France had no guarantee that in any future attack by Germany she would have any such assistance.  To be sure, the French knew that Britain must come to the aid of France if there was any danger of Germany defeating France.  The Milner Group knew this too.  But France wanted some arrangement by which Britain would be alongside France from the first moment of a German attack, since the French had no assurance that they could withstand a German onslaught alone, even for a brief period.  Moreover, if they could, the French were afraid that the opening onslaught would deliver to the Germans control of the most productive part of France as captured territory.  This is what had happened in 1914.  To avoid this, the French sought in vain one alternative after another:  (a) to detach from Germany, or, at least, to occupy for an extended period, the Rhimeland area of Germany (this would put the Ruhr, the most vital industrial area of Germany, within striking distance of French forces);  (b) to get a British-American, or at least a British, guarantee of French territory;  (c) to get a “League of Nations with teeth,” that is, one with its own police forces and powers to act automatically against an aggressor.  All of these were blocked by the English and Americans at the Peace Conference in 1919.  The French sought substitutes.  Of these, the only one they obtained was a system of alliances with new states, like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the enlarged Rumania, on the east of Germany.  All of these states were of limited power, and the French had little faith in the effectiveness of their assistance.  Accordingly, the French continued to seek their other aims:  to extend the fifteen years’ occupation of the Rhineland into a longer or even an indefinite period;  to get some kind of British guarantee;  to strengthen the League of Nations by “plugging the gaps in the Covenant”;  to use the leverage of reparations and disarmament as provided in the Treaty of Versailles to keep Germany down, to wreck her economically, or even to occupy the Ruhr.  All of these efforts were blocked by the machinations of the Milner Group.  At the moment, we shall refer only to the efforts to “plug the gaps in the Covenant.”

These “gaps,” as we have indicated, were put in by Cecil Hurst and were exactly to the taste of the Milner Group.  The chief efforts of the French and their allies on the Continent to “plug the gaps” were the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance (1923) and the Geneva Protocol (1924).  What the Milner Group thought of both of these can be gathered from the following extracts from The Round Table’s denunciation of the Protocol.  In the December 1924 issue, in an article entitled “The British Commonwealth, the Protocol, and the League,” we find the following:  “What is to be the British answer to this invitation to reenter the stormy field of internal European politics?  Can the British Commonwealth afford to become permanently bound up with the internal political structure of Europe?  And will it promote the peace and stability of Europe or the world that Europe should attempt to solve its problems on the basis of a permanent British guarantee?  The answer in our judgment to both these questions must be an emphatic, No.”  Then, after repeating its contention that the only purpose of the Covenant was to secure delay in a crisis for consultation, it continued:

The idea that all nations ought to consult how they are to deal with States which precipitate war without allowing any period for enquiry and mediation is the real heart of the League of Nations, and, if the British Commonwealth wants to prevent a recurrence of the Great War, it must be willing to recognize that it has a vital interest in working out with other nations the best manner of giving effect to this fundamental idea. ... Decisions as to the rights and wrongs of international disputes, and of what common action the nations should take when they are called together to deal with such an outlaw, must be left to be determined in the light of the circumstances of the time.... The view of The Round Table is that the British Commonwealth should make it perfectly clear ... that it will accept no further obligations than this and that the Covenant of the League must be amended to establish beyond question that no authority, neither the Council nor any arbitral body it may appoint, has any power to render a binding decision or to order a war, except with the consent of the members themselves.

The bitterness of the Group’s feelings against France at the time appears in the same article a couple of pages later when it asked:  “Or is the proposal implicit in the Protocol merely one for transferring to the shoulders of Great Britain, which alone is paying her debts, some part of the cost of maintaining that preponderance which now rests upon the European States which profit most by it.... It is sheer rubbish to suggest that France needs military guarantees for security. ... What France really wants is a guarantee that the allies will maintain a perpetual preponderance over Germany.  This we can never give her, for in the long run it makes not for peace but for war.”

In another article in the same issue, the Protocol was analyzed and denounced.  The final conclusion was:  “It is our firm conviction that no alternative is acceptable which fails to provide for the free exercise by the Parliaments and peoples of the Empire of their judgment as to how to deal with any disturbance of the peace, or any threat of such disturbance, on its merits as it arises.  That has been the guiding principle throughout the political history of the British peoples.  The methods of the Protocol belong to another world, and, if for no other reason, they should be rejected.”

The Protocol was officially rejected by Austen Chamberlain at a session of the Council of the League of Nations in March 1925.  John Dove, Lionel Curtis, Philip Kerr, and Wilson Harris went to Geneva to be present at the meeting.  After the deed was done, they went to visit Prague and Berlin, and ended by meeting Lady Astor in Paris.  From Geneva and Paris, John Dove wrote to Brand letters which Brand later published in his edition of The Letters of John Dove.

One of the reasons given by Austen Chamberlain in 1925 for rejecting the Geneva Protocol was the opposition of the Dominions.  That the Milner Group was able to affect Dominion opinion on this subject is clear.  They could use men like Massey and Glazebrook in Canada, Bavin and Eggleston in Australia, Downie Stewart and Allen in New Zealand, Smuts and Duncan in South Africa.

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 in 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 D'Abernon would be replaced as British Ambassador in Berlin that he wrote 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 D'Abernon 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 D'Abernon 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), I, 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 D'Abernon 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), 115-117.

7 On this organization, see Institute of Politics, Williams College, The Institute of Politics at Williamstown: Its First Decade (Williamstown, Mass., 1931).