[Editors Note: Carroll Quigley provides a good source of information regarding the Rhodes secret-society. Quigley was a professor of western civilization and history, who did his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard, where he received a doctorate in 1938. He later taught at Princeton, Harvard, and finally, at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. He was a consultant for the Brookings Institution, the Defense Department, the State Department, and the Navy. In 1962 the Center for Strategic and International Studies was established on the Georgetown campus, where it maintained close ties with the School of Foreign Service. CSIS included a number of people on its staff who had high-level CIA connections. The CSIS is controlled and staffed by Council on Foreign Relations members [ see "The CFR & the Center for Strategic and International Studies" ] The Council on Foreign Relations is a branch of an international group of co-conspirators that has shaped world events for over 100 years.

One of Quigley's Georgetown students, William Jefferson Clinton, would become President of the United States. Toward the end of President Clinton's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on July 16, 1992 Clinton said "as a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so." The Washington Times ran an item that tried to clear matters up. Professor Quigley, according to the Times, specialized in the history of a secret group of elite Anglo-Americans who had a decisive influence on world affairs during the first half of this century. Quigley, in other words, was a conspiracy theorist -- but one who had an impeccable pedigree. Quigley came out and exposed the Eastern establishment plan for world government.[12]

Carroll Quigley's research concerned the role of the Rhodes-Milner Secret Societies in Britain from 1891 through World War II. His major work, Tragedy and Hope, first appeared in 1966, while Clinton was one of Quigley's students at Georgetown. It contains scattered references to Quigley's twenty years of research in this area:

"I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies, but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known." [13]

People's actions are strongly influenced by their knowledge base. People act on their beliefs. You can manipulate a person's actions by corrupting their knowledge base, warping historical truth, or ignoring it completely. Knowledge can make for independence if it helps people meet their world more confidently and realistically. Those who have wanted others to remain dependent have always recognized this fact and have opposed the spread of knowledge.

Tragedy and Hope is a historical text that is over 1300 pages. It contains no footnotes but was written by a historian with excellent credentials. Despite his standing as a historian Quigley's history is missing the Council on Foreign Relation's role in numerous historical events including: 1. The part played by Council on Foreign Relations members in creating the first American central intelligence agency -- The INQUIRY. 2. The history of the Council on Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies Group and how it lead to the Council taking control of the State Department of the United States. 3. How the Council on Foreign Relations created the Psychological Strategy Board, aka the Operations Coordinating Board, aka the Special group, and the role of this group in coordinating massive international psycho-political operations from the Truman administration on 4. How Council on Foreign Relations Members George Kennan and Walter Lippmann worked on a psycho-political operation that would force the Marshall plan on unwilling Americans 5. The significant role played by Council on Foreign Relations and Royal Institute of International Affairs members in establishing the United Nations at Dumbarton Oaks.

Quigley's book, Tragedy and Hope, appeared just when other people began to take a close look at the Council on Foreign Relations. Quigley's book was meant to steal their thunder, and provide intelligence organizations with a way to identify people interested in the subject. Don Bell featured Tragedy and Hope in one of this reports in 1966. Gary Allen began quoting it in The John Birch Society magazine American Opinion, in early 1969. Gary Allen and Larry Abraham published a best seller, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, that relied heavily on Quigley's book. W. Cleon Skousen, a former FBI agent published a book-length review of Quigley's Tragedy and Hope that was titled The Naked Capitalist in 1970. It quoted so heavily from Quigley's work that Quigley threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Just as Tragedy and Hope was becoming popular, Macmillan, the publishers, stopped printing the book and destroyed the plates.[14]

Quigley's detailed history of the Rhodes-Milner Secret Societies, "The Anglo-American Establishment," was written in 1949 and not published until 1981, four years after Quigley died. In "The ANGLO-AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT" Quigley writes,

"One Wintry Afternoon in February 1891, three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London. From that conversation were to flow consequences of the greatest importance to the British Empire and to the world as a whole. For these men were organizing a secret society that was, for more than fifty years, to be one of the most important forces in the formulation and execution of British imperial and foreign policy.

The three men who were thus engaged were already well known in England. The leader was Cecil Rhodes, fabulously wealthy empire builder and the most important person in South Africa. The second was William T. Stead, the famous, and probably also the most sensational, journalist of the day. The third was Reginald Baliol Brett, later known as Lord Esher, friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential advisor of King Edward VII and King George V.

The details of this important conversation will be examined later. At present we need only point out that the three drew up a plan of organization for their secret society and a list of original members. The plan for organization provided for an inner circle, to be known as "The Society of the Elect," and an outer circle, to be known as "The Association of Helpers." Within The Society of the Elect, the real power was to be exercised by the leader, and a "Junta of Three." The leader was to be Rhodes, and the Junta was to be Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner. In accordance with this decision, Milner was added to the society by Stead shortly after the meeting we have described."[15]

Of the Secret Societies goals and methods of operation Quigley writes, "The goals which Rhodes and Milner sought and the methods by which they hoped to achieve them were so similar by 1902 that the two are almost indistinguishable. Both sought to unite the world, and above all the English-speaking world, in a federal structure around Britain. Both felt that this goal could best be achieved by a secret band of men united to one another by devotion to the common cause and by personal loyalty to one another. Both felt that this band should pursue its goal by secret political and economic influence behind the scenes and by the control of journalistic, educational, and propaganda agencies.."[16]

The group has been so successful in keeping their role in shaping world events a secret that even students of history and public affairs are unfamiliar with their accomplishments or the extent to which they control their nation. Quigley points out,

"This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda. It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Bore War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South Arican periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the the three years 1919-1922; it publicized the idea of and the name "British Commonwealth of Nations" in the period 1908-1918; it was the chief influence in Lloyd George's war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and writing of the history of British Imperial and Foreign Policy since the Bore War."[17]

Chapter 4 from Carroll Quigley's book The Anglo-American Establishment follows. The Chapter is about the Rhodes' secret-society members who were present in South Africa between the Boer War and the creation of the the union of South Africa (1897-1910).]

4

Milner's Kindergarten, 1897-1910

THE APPOINTMENT as High Commissioner of South Africa was the turning point in Milner's life. It was obtained, apparently, through his membership in Rhodes's secret society, through the influence of Stead, Brett, and Rhodes. Stead, in his book on Rhodes's wills, claims the chief credit for the nomination, while Brett was with Milner at Windsor when he received the appointment and returned with him to London. Sir Harry Johnston, who had already been offered the appointment for himself by a Foreign Office official, felt that it was Rhodes's influence which gave it to Milner. In his autobiography he wrote: "At last the decision was made Sir Alfred Milner. I suspect very much on the personal pleadings of Cecil Rhodes, who professed himself delighted with the choice....The non-selection of myself for a work that would have greatly. interested me, was a disappointment, and I felt it was due to Rhodes' enmity more than to any other cause."

As High Commissioner, Milner was subordinate to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, a post held at that time by Joseph Chamberlain, who was already acquainted with Milner. They had fought Home Rule together in the election of 1888 and had both been in Egypt 1889.

They already agreed on most of the important issues of the day, combining, like other members of the Milner Group, advocacy of social welfare and imperialism. Moreover, both were strong believers in union with Ireland and a new tariff policy based on imperial preference. When Chamberlain joined Lord Salisbury's government as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1895-1903), he was eager to accept the suggestion that Milner be sent to South Africa. As Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain did a number of things that won the complete support of Milner. Among these we might mention the new constitution for Jamaica (1899), the federation of the Malay States (1895), and the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia (1900). When Chamberlain resigned from the Colonial Office in 1903 on the issue of tariff reform, the post offered by Balfour to Milner. The latter refused in order to complete the work he had started in South Africa. When he was ready to retire from his post, he recommended that his successor be either Alfred Lyttelton or Lord Selborne. The latter obtained the appointment and not only carried Milner's work to completion but did it with Milner's picked personnel. That personnel regarded Selborne as second leader to Milner in the Group.[1]

As High Commissioner, Milner built up a body of assistants known in history as "Milner's Kindergarten." The following list gives the chief members of the Kindergarten, their dates of birth and death (where possible), their undergraduate colleges (with dates), and the dates in which they were Fellows of All Souls.

NAME                                          DATES           COLLEGE            ALL SOULS

Patrick Duncan (later Sir Patrick)             1870-1946      Balliol 1890-1894         Never

Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian)               1882-1940      New 1897-1901           Never

Robert Henry Brand (later Lord Brand)       1878-1963      New 1897-1901           1901-

Lionel Curtis                                   1872-1955      New 1891-1905          1921-

Geoffrey Dawson (until 1917 Robinson)      1874-1944      Magdalen 1893-1897     1898-1905; 1915-1944

John Buchan (later Lord Tweedsmuir)         1875-1940      Brasenose 1895-1899     Never

Dougal Orme Malcolm (later Sir Dougal)       1877-1955      New 1895-1899           1899-1955

William Lionel Hichens                         1874-1941      New 1894-1898           Never

Richard Feetham                                1874-1965      New 1893-1898           Never

John Dove                                      1872-1934      New 1891-1895           Never

Basil Williams                                  1867-1950      New 1886-1891           1924-1925

Lord Basil Blackwood                          1870-1917      Balliol 1891-              Never

Hugh A. Wyndham                             1877            New 1896-1900           Never

George V. Fiddes (later Sir George)            1858-1925      Brasenose 1880-1884     Never

John Hanbury-Williams (later Sir John)        1859-1946      Wellington, N.Z.          Never

Main S. O. Walrond                             1870-           Balliol                      Never

Fabian Ware (later Sir Fabian)                   1869-1949      Univ. of Paris             Never

William Flavelle Monypenny                    1866-1912      Balliol 1888-1890         Never

To these eighteen names should be added five others who were present in South Africa between the Boer War and the creation of the Union and were members of the Milner Group but cannot be listed under the Kindergarten because they were not members of Milner's civil service.[ 2]

These five are:

NAME                                             DATES           COLLEGE                ALL SOULS

Leopold Amery                                  1873-1955      Balliol 1892-1896           1897-1911; 1938 -

Edward Grigg (later Lord Altrincham)           1879-1955      New 1898-1902            Never

H. A. L. Fisher                                  1865-1940       New 1884-1888            Never

Edward F. L. Wood(later Lord Irwin            1881-1959       Christ Church 1899-1903  1903-1910

and Lord Halifax)

Basil K. Long                                     1878-1944       Brasenose1897-1901        Never

Of these twenty-three names, eleven were from New College. Seven were members of All Souls, six as Fellows. These six had held their fellowships by 1947 an aggregate of one hundred and sixty-nine years, or an average of over twenty-eight years each. Of the twenty-three, nine were in the group which founded, edited, and wrote The Round Table in the period after 1910, five were in close personal contact with Lloyd George (two in succession as private secretaries) in the period 1916-1922, and seven were in the group which controlled and edited The Times after 1912.

Eleven of these twenty-three men, plus others whom we have mentioned, formed the central core of the Milner Group as it has existed from 1910 to the present. These others will be discussed in their proper place. At this point we should take a rapid glance at the biographies of some of the others.

Two members of the Kindergarten, Patrick Duncan and Richard Feetham, stayed in South Africa after the achievement of the Union in 1910. Both remained important members of the Milner Group and, as a result of this membership, rose to high positions in their adopted country. Patrick Duncan had been Milner's assistant on the Board of Internal Revenue from 1894 to 1897 and was taken with him to South Africa as private secretary. He was Treasurer of the Transvaal in 1901, Colonial Secretary of the Transvaal in 1903-1906, and Acting Lieutenant Governor in 1906. He remained in South Africa as a lieutenant to Jan Smuts, becoming an advocate of the Supreme Court there, a member of the South African Parliament, Minister of Interior, Public Health, and Education (1921-1924), Minister of Mines (1933-1936), and finally Governor-General of South Africa (1936-1946). He frequently returned to England to confer with the Group (in September 1932, for example, at Lord Lothian's country house, Blickling).

Richard Feetham was made Deputy Town Clerk and later Town Clerk of Johannesburg (1902-1905). He was legal adviser to Lord Selborne, the High Commissioner, in 1907 and a member of the Legislative Council of the Transvaal later (1907-1910). He was chairman of the Committee on Decentralization of Powers in India in 1918-1919; a King's Counsel in Transvaal (1919-1923); a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa (1923-1930); chairman of the Irish Boundary Commission (1924-1925); chairman of the Local Government Commission in Kenya Colony (of which Edward Grigg was Governor) in 1926; adviser to the Shanghai Municipal Council (1930-1931); chairman of the Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Commission (1930-1935); Vice-Chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1938); and has been a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa since 1939. Most of these positions, as we shall see, came to him as a member of the Milner Group.

Hugh A. Wyndham also remained in South Africa after 1910 and was a member of the Union Parliament for ten years (1910-1920). He had previously been secretary to Milner. In spite of the prominence of his family and his own position as heir presumptive to the third Baron Leconfield, it is difficult to obtain any adequate information about him. His biography in Who's Who does not mention his experiences in South Africa or his other connections with the Milner Group. This is obviously the result of a deliberate policy, since editions of Who 's Who of thirty-five years ago do mention the South African connection. Wyndham wrote Problems of Imperial Trusteeship (1933) Britain and the World; and the chapter on "The Formation of the Union of South Africa, 1901-1910" in volume VIII of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (1936). He was, like all the members of the Milner Group, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, wrote many book reviews for its Journal, and at the outbreak of war in 1939 became the usual presiding officer at its meetings (in the absence of Lord Astor). When publication of the journal was resumed after the war, he became chairman of its editorial board, a position he still holds. Married to Maude Lyttelton, daughter of Viscount Cobham, he is also a brother-in-law of Sir Ivor Maxse (the brother of Lady Milner) and a nephew of Lord Rosebery.

Dougal Malcolm (Sir Dougal since 1938), a grandson of Lord Charles Wellesley, joined the Colonial Office in 1900 and served there under Chamberlain and Alfred Lyttelton for several years. In 1905 he went to South Africa as private secretary to Lord Selborne and remained there until Union was achieved. He was secretary to Lord Grey, Governor-General of Canada, during the last year of his tenure (1910-1911); an official of the British Treasury for a year; and, in 1913, became a director of the British South Africa Company (president since 1938). He is also vice-president of the British North Borneo Company, of which his brother-in-law, General Sir Neill Malcolm, is president. [3] Sir Dougal wrote the biographies of Otto Belt, of Dr. Jameson, and of J. Rochford Maguire for the Dictionary of National Biography.

William Lionel Hichens (1874-1940), on graduating from New College, served briefly as a cyclist messenger in the Boer War and then joined the Egyptian Ministry of Finance (1900). After only nine months' service, he was shifted by Milner to South Africa to join the Kindergarten as Treasurer of Johannesburg. He at once went to England to float a loan, and on his return (in 1902) was made Colonial Treasurer of the Transvaal and Treasurer of the Intercolonial Council. Later he added to his responsibilities the role of Acting Commissioner of Railways. In 1907 he went to India as a member of the Royal Commission on Decentralization, following this with a stint as chairman of the Board of Inquiry into Public Service in Southern Rhodesia (1909). In 1910 he went into private business, becoming chairman of the board of a great steel firm, Cammell Laird and Company, but continued as a member of the Milner Group. In 1915, Lloyd George sent Hichens and Brand to organize the munitions industry of Canada. They set up the Imperial Munitions Board of Canada on which Joseph Flavelle (Sir Joseph after 1917) was made chairman, Charles B. Gordon (Sir Charles after 1917) vice-chairman, and Brand a member. In later years Hichens was a prominent businessman, one of the great steel masters of England, director of the Commonwealth Trust Company (which sent John Dove to India in 1918), of the London Northwestern Railway and its successor, the London, Midlands and Scottish. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust for over twenty years (1919-1940), which may help to explain the extraordinary generosity of the Carnegie Foundation toward the Royal Institute of International Affairs (of which Hichens was a member). He was an enthusiastic supporter of adult education programs and spent years of effort on Birkbeck College, the graduate evening school of the University of London. He was chairman of the board of governors of this institution from 1927 until his death, by a German bomb, in December of 1940. From 1929 onwards, like most of the inner circle of the Milner Group, he lived close to Oxford (at North Aston). He married Hermione Lyttelton, daughter of Sir Neville Lyttelton, niece of Viscount Cobham, and cousin of the present Oliver Lyttelton.

George Vandeleur Fiddes (Sir George after 1912) had been private secretary to the Earl of Onslow, father of Lady Halifax, before he was secretary to Milner in South Africa (1897-1900). Later he was political Secretary to the Commander-in-Chief in South Africa (1900), secretary to the Transvaal administration (1900-1902), Assistant Under Secretary of State for the Colonies (1909-1916), and Permanent Under Secretary for the Colonies (1916-1921).

John Hanbury-Williams (Sir John after 1908) had been in the regular army for nineteen years, chiefly as aide to various colonial administrators, when he was assigned to Milner as military secretary in 1897. After three years of that, he went to London as secretary to the Secretary of State for War (St. John Brodrick, 1900-1903), and to Canada as secretary and military secretary to the Governor-General, Earl Grey (1904-1909). Then he was brigadier general in charge of administration in Scotland (1909-1914) and on the General Staff (1914), Chief of the British Military Mission to Russia (1914-1917), in charge of the British Prisoners of War Department at The Hague (1917-1918) and in Switzerland (1918), and ended his career in a blaze of glory as a major general, marshal of the diplomatic corps (1920-1934), and extra equerry to three Kings of England (1934-1946).

John Buchan was not a member of the inner core of the Milner Group, but was close to it and was rewarded in 1935 by being raised to a barony as Lord Tweedsmuir and sent to Canada as Governor General. He is important because he is (with Lionel Curtis) one of the few members of the inner circles of the Milner Group who have written about it in published work. In his autobiography, Pilgrim's Way (Boston, 1940), he gives a brief outline of the personnel of the Kindergarten and their subsequent achievements, and a brilliant analysis of Milner himself. He wrote:

"He (Milner) had received chiefly from Arnold Toynbee an inspiration which centered all his interests on the service of the state. He had the instincts of a radical reformer joined to a close-textured intellect which reformers rarely possess. He had a vision of the Good Life spread in a wide commonality; and when his imagination apprehended the Empire, his field of vision was marvelously enlarged. So at the outset of his career he dedicated himself to a cause, putting things like leisure, domestic happiness, and money-making behind him. In Bacon's phrase he espoused the State. On the intellectual side he found that which wholly satisfied him in the problems of administration, when he confronted them as Goschen's secretary, and in Egypt, and at Somerset House. He had a mind remarkable both for its scope and its mastery over details the most powerful administrative intelligence, I think, which Britain has produced in our day. If I may compare him with others, he was as infallible as Cromer in detecting the center of gravity in a situation, as brilliant as Alfred Belt in bringing order out of tangled finances, and he had Curzon's power of keeping a big organization steadily at work. He was no fanatic-his intelligence was too supreme for that but in the noblest sense of the word, he was an enthusiast. He narrowed his interests of set purpose, and this absorption meant a certain rigidity. He had cut himself off from some of the emollients of life. Consequently, the perfect administrator was a less perfect diplomatist. . . [Later, Buchan adds,] I was brought into close touch with a great character. Milner was the most selfless man I have ever known. He thought of his work and his cause, much of his colleagues, never of himself. He simply was not interested in what attracts common ambition. He could not be bribed, for there was nothing on the globe wherewith to bribe him; or deterred by personal criticism, for he cared not at all for fame; and it would have been as easy to bully the solar system, since he did not know the meaning of fear."

The effect Milner had on Buchan was shared by the other members of the Kindergarten and provided that spiritual bond which animated the Milner Group. This spirit, found in Toynbee, in Goschen, in Milner, and later in Lionel Curtis, was the motivating force of the Milner Group until after 1922. Indeed, much of what Buchan says here about Milner could be applied with slight change to Lionel Curtis, and Curtis, as we shall see, was the motivating force of the Milner Group from 1910 to 1922. After 1922, as the influence of Lord Lothian, Lord Astor, and Lord Brand increased and that of Milner declined, the spirit of the Group became somewhat tarnished but not completely lost.

Buchan went to Brasenose College, but, as he says himself, "I lived a good deal at Balliol and my closest friends were of that college." He mentions as his closest friends Hilaire Belloc, F. E. Smith (the future Lord Birkenhead), John Simon, Leo Amery, T. A. Nelson, Arthur Salter, Bron Lucas, Edward Wood (the future Lord Halifax), and Raymond Asquith. Of this list, five were future Fellows of All Souls, and four of these were important members of the Milner Group.

Buchan went to South Africa in 1901, on Milner's personal invitation, to be his private secretary, but stayed only two years. Placed in charge of resettlement of displaced Boers and agricultural reform (both close to Milner's heart), he left in 1903 to take an important position in the administration of Egypt. This appointment was mysteriously canceled after his return to England because, according to Buchan, he was too young for the task. It is more than likely that Milner, who had obtained the appointment for him, changed his mind because of Buchan's rapidly declining enthusiasm for imperial federation. This was a subject on which Milner and other members of his Group were adamant for many years. By 1915 most members of the Group began to believe that federation was impossible, and, as a compromise, took what we know now as the Commonwealth of Nations -that is, a group of nations joined together by common ideals and allegiances rather than by fixed political organization. Lionel Curtis remains to this day a fanatical believer in federation, and some of the decline in his influence after 1922 may be attributed to inability to obtain federation in the face of world and above all Dominion opposition. The present Commonwealth is in reality the compromises worked out when the details of the Milner Group clashed with the reality of political facts.

As a result of Buchan's failure to obtain the appointment of Egypt, he continued to practice law in London for three years, finally abandoning it to become a partner in the publishing firm of his old classmate Thomas A. Nelson (1906-1916). In 1907 he married Susan Grosvenor, whose family (Dukes of Westminster) was allied, as we have seen, to the Wyndhams, Cavendishes, Lytteltons, and Primroses (Earls of Rosebery and Lords Dalmeny). As a result of this family connection, Buchan wrote a memoir on Lord Rosebery for Proceedings of the British Academy in 1930 and a book on the Grosvenor twins, who were killed in the war.

During the war, Buchan was a correspondent for The Times, wrote Nelson's History of the Great War in twenty-four volumes (1915-1919), was the military intelligence in France (1916-1917), and finally was Director of Information for the War Office (1917-1918). During this period and later, he was a prolific writer of travel, historical, and adventure stories, becoming eventually, by such works as Greenmantle, The Three Hostages, and The Thirty-nine Steps, the most famous writer of adventure stories in Britain. His connection with South Africa gained him the post of official historian of the South African forces in France. He was a close friend of Lord Hal Dane and Lord Rosebery, both of whom can be regarded as members of the Milner Group. Of Haldane, Buchan wrote: "What chiefly attracted me to him was his loyalty to Milner. Milner thought him the ablest man in public life, abler even than Arthur Balfour, and alone of his former Liberal allies Hal Dane stood by him on every count." Hal Dane, with Rosebery, Asquith, and Edward Grey, had formed the Liberal League to support liberal imperialism, with which Milner was closely associated.

Buchan was representative of the Scottish universities in the House of Commons for eight years (1927-1935), Lord High Commissioner for the Church of Scotland in 1933-1934, president of the Scottish Historical Society (1929-1933), and Chancellor of Edinburgh University), before he obtained his last post, Governor-General of Canada (1935-1940).

Basil Williams graduated from New College in 1891 and almost immediately became clerk in the House of Commons, holding this post for nine years before he went soldiering in the Boer War. He became Secretary of the Transvaal Education Department, wrote Volume IV of The Times History of the South African War, and was The Times special correspondent at the South African Convention of 1908-1919, which made the Union. A major on the General Staff in 1918-1909, he was later Ford Lecturer at Oxford (in 1921), Professor of History at McGill (1921-1925), and Professor of History at Edinburgh (1925-1937). He wrote the very revealing article on Milner in the Dictionary of National Biography and numerous other works, including Cecil Rhodes (1921), The British Empire (for the Home University Library, 1928), Volume XI of the Oxford History of England (The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1 760), Botha, Smuts, and South Africa (1946), and edited The Makers of the Nineteenth Century (1915-1928).

Lord Basil Blackwood, son and heir of Lord Dufferin, went to Balliol in 1891 but never graduated, being an adventurer of the first order. Taken to South Africa by Milner, he was employed in the Judge Advocate's Department for a year (1900-1901), then was Assistant Colonial Secretary of Orange River Colony for six years (1901-1907). He became Colonial Secretary of Barbados in 1907 and Assistant Secretary of the Land Development Commission in England in 1910. He would have been an important member of the Milner Group but was killed in France in 1917.

Of the major members of the Kindergarten, Robert H. Brand (since 1946 Baron Brand) stands close to the top. His father was second Viscount Brand, twenty-fourth Baron Dacre (created 1307), son of a Speaker of the House of Commons (1872-1884), while his mother was Susan Cavendish, daughter of Lord George Cavendish, and niece of the seventh Duke of Devonshire. His father, as Governor of New South Wales in 1895-1899, was one of the original instigators of the federation of the Australian Colonies, which came into effect in 1900. His older brother, the third Viscount Hampden, was a lord-in-waiting to the King (1924-1936), while another brother, Admiral Sir Hubert Brand, was extra equerry to the King (1922) and principal naval aide to the King (1931-1932). His nephew, Freeman Freeman-Thomas (Baron Willingdon after 1910; Marquess of Willingdon after 1936), in 1892 married the daughter of Lord Brassey, and became Governor-General of Canada (1926-1931) and Viceroy of India (1931-1936).

Brand, who has been a Fellow of All Souls since 1901, is chiefly responsible for the Astor influence in the Milner Group. He went to South Africa in 1902 and was made secretary of the Intercolonial Council of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and secretary of the Railway Committee of the Central South African Railways, with Philip Kerr (the future Lord Lothian) as assistant secretary on both organizations. He was secretary to the Transvaal Delegation at the South African National Convention (1908-1909) and at once wrote a deliberately naive work published by Oxford University Press in 1909 with the title The Union of South Africa. In this work there is no mention of the Kindergarten, and where it is necessary to speak of its work, this is done as if it were performed by persons unknown to the writer. He says, for example (page 40): "The Transvaal Delegation alone was assisted throughout the convention by a staff of legal advisers and experts," and thus dismisses the Kindergarten's essential work. His own work is passed over in silence, and at the front of the volume is placed a quotation in Dutch from President Sir John Brand of the Orange River Colony, possibly to mislead the ordinary reader into believing that there was a family connection between the South African politician and the author of the book.

Brand's role in the Milner Group after 1910 is too great to be covered adequately here. Suffice it to say that he was regarded as the economist of the Round Table Group and became a partner and managing director of Lazard Brothers and Company, a director of Lloyd's Bank, and a director of The Times, retiring from these positions in 1944 and 1945. During the First World War, he was a member of the Imperial Munitions Board of Canada (1915-1918) and deputy chairman of the British Mission in Washington (1917-1918). While in Washington, he married Nancy Astor's sister, daughter of Chiswell Dabney Langhorne of Virginia. It was this connection which gave him his entree to Cliveden in the period when that name became notorious.

Brand was one of the important figures in international finance in the period after 1918. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 he was financial adviser to Lord Robert Cecil, chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. He was later vice-president of the Brussels Conference (1920) and financial representative for South Africa at the Genoa Conference (1922). He was a member of the committee of experts on stabilization of the German mark in 1923, the committee which paved the way for the Dawes Plan. After an extended period in private business, he was head of the British Food Mission to Washington (1941-1944), chairman of the British Supply Council in North America (1942-1945, 1946), and His Majesty's Treasury Representative in Washington (1944-1946). In this last capacity he had much to do with negotiating the enormous American loan to Britain for postwar reconstruction. During the years 1942-1944, Brand put in his own place as managing director of Lazard Brothers his nephew, Thomas Henry Brand, son of Viscount Hampden, and, when Brand left Lazard in 1944, he brought the same nephew to Washington as chief executive officer on the British side of the Combined Production and Resources Board, and later (1945) as chairman of the official Committee on Supplies for Liberated Areas. In all of his activities Brand has remained one of the most central figures in the core of the Milner Group.

Just as important as Brand was his intimate friend Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian), whom we have already seen as Brand's assistant in South Africa. Kerr, grandson, through his mother, of the fourteenth Duke of Norfolk, originally went to South Africa as private secretary to a friend of his father's, Sir Arthur Lawley, Lieutenant Governor of the Transvaal (1902). Kerr was Brand's assistant on the Intercolonial Council and on the Committee of the Central South African Railways (1905-1908). Later, as secretary to the Transvaal Indigency Commission (1907-1908), he wrote a report on the position of poor white laborers in a colored country which was so valuable that it was republished by the Union government twenty years later.

From 1908 on, Kerr was, as we shall see, one of the chief organizers of publicity in favor of the South African Union. He was secretary to the Round Table Group in London and editor of The Round Table from 1910 to 1916, leaving the post to become secretary to Lloyd George (1916-1922), manager of the Daily Chronicle (1921), and secretary to the Rhodes Trust (1925-1939). He obtained several governmental offices after the death of his cousin, the tenth Marquess of Lothian, in 1930, gave him a title, 28,000 acres of land, and a seat in the House of Lords. He was Chancellor to the Duchy of Lancaster (1931), Parliamentary Under Secretary to the India Office (1931-1932), a member of the first and second Round Table Conferences on India, and chairman of the Indian Franchise Committee, before he finished his life as Ambassador to the United States (1939-1940). In 1923 he and Lionel Curtis published a book called The Prevention of War, consisting of lectures which they had previously given at Williams College. After his death, Curtis edited a collection of American Speeches of Lord Lothian, with an introduction by Lord Halifax and a biographical sketch by Edward Grigg (reprinted from The Round Table). This was published, as might be expected, by Chatham House.

On his death, Lord Lothian left his ancestral estate, Newbattle Abbey in Midlothian, as a residential college for adult education in Scotland, and left his Tudor country house, Blickling (frequent assembly place of the Milner Group), as a national monument. He never married and gave up his Roman Catholic faith for Christian Science in the course of an almost fatal illness in 1914.

Geoffrey Dawson (1874-1944), who changed his name from Robinson in 1917, was also one of the innermost members of the Milner Group. A member of the Colonial Office under Chamberlain (1898-1901), he became for five years private secretary to Milner in South Africa (1901-1905) and then was made South African correspondent of The Times and editor of the Johannesburg Star in the critical period of the formation of the Union (1905-1910). Always a member of the Round Table Group and the Milner Group, Dawson added to these the offices of editor of The Times (1912-1919, 1922-1941) and secretary to the Rhodes Trustees (1921-1922). During the period in which Dawson was not editor of The Times, he was well provided for by the Milner Group, being made estates bursar of All Souls, a director of Consolidated Gold Fields, Ltd., and of Trust Houses, Ltd. (both Rhodes concerns), as well as being secretary to the Rhodes Trust. He married in 1919 the daughter of Sir Arthur Lawley (later sixth Baron Wenlock), Kerr's old chief in the Transvaal. Sir Arthur, who had started his career as private secretary to his uncle, the Duke of Westminster, in 1892, ended it as Governor of Madras (1906-1911).

Dawson was probably as close to Milner personally as any member of the Kindergarten, although Amery must be regarded as Milner's political heir. The Times' obituary of Dawson says: "To none was Milner's heart more wholly given than to Dawson; the sympathy between the older and the younger man was almost that of father and son, and it lasted unchanged until Milner's death." As editor of The Times, Dawson was one of the most influential figures in England. He used that influence in the directions decided by the Group. This was to be seen, in later years, in the tremendous role which he played in the affairs of India and, above all, in the appeasement policy. In 1929 he visited his "long-standing friend" Lord Halifax, then Viceroy of India, and subsequently wrote most of The Times editorials on India in the fight which preceded the Government of India Act of 1935. In 1937 he wrote The Times articles which inaugurated the last stage of appeasement, and personally guided The Times support of that policy. After his retirement from the chair of editor of The Times in 1941, he served for the last three years of his life as editor of The Round Table.

William Flavelle Monypenny was assistant editor of The Times (1894-1899) before he went to South Africa to become editor of the Johannesburg Star. He left this position at the outbreak of the Boer War, since the publication of a pro-British paper was not possible during the hostilities. After a short period as a lieutenant in the Imperial Light Horse (1899-1900), Monypenny was made Director of Civil Supplies under Milner (1900-1902) and then resumed his post as editor of the Star. In 1903 he resigned in protest against Milner's policy of importing Chinese laborers and walked across Africa from the Cape to Egypt. Resuming his position on The Times (1903-1908), he became a director of the firm for the last four years of his life (1908-1912). About this time Lord Rowton, who had been Disraeli's private secretary, left his papers to The Times to be used for a Life of Disraeli. The task was begun by Monypenny, but he finished only the first two volumes of the six-volume work. The last four volumes were written by George E. Buckle, editor of The Times (1884-1912), Fellow of All Souls (1877-1885), and a contemporary of Milner's at Oxford (1872-1876).

It is perhaps worth noting that when Monypenny resigned from the Johannesburg Star he was replaced as editor by William Basil Worsfold, who held the post for two years, being replaced, as we have said, by Geoffrey Dawson. In the years 1906-1913 Worsfold published a three-volume study of Milner's accomplishments in South Africa. This contains the most valuable account in existence of the work of the Kindergarten. [4]

Fabian Ware (Sir Fabian since 1922), who had been a reporter on The Morning Post (1899-1901), was Assistant Director and Director of Education in the Transvaal (1901-1905) and Director of Education in the Orange River Colony (1903), as well as a member of the Transvaal Legislative Council (1903-1905). He was editor of The Morning Post in 1905-1911 and then became special commissioner to the board of the Rio Tinto Company, on which Milner was director. During the First World War he rose to the rank of major general. Since then he has been permanent vice-chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission. A book which he wrote in 1937, The Immortal Heritage, The Work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, was made the occasion of an article on this subject in The Round Table. Sir Fabian was a member of the Imperial Committee on Economic Consultation and Cooperation in 1933 and was a director-general in the War Office in 1939-1944.

Main Swete Osmond Walrond was in the Ministry of Finance in Egypt (1894-1897) before he became Milner's private secretary for the whole period of his High Commissionership (1897-1905). He was then appointed District Commissioner in Cyprus but did not take the post. In 1917-1919 he was in the Arab Bureau in Cairo under the High Commissioner and acted as an unofficial, but important, adviser to Milner's mission to Egypt in 1919-1921. This mission led to Egyptian independence from Britain.

Lionel Curtis is one of the most important members of the Milner Group, or, as a member of the Group expressed it to me, he is the fons et origo. It may sound extravagant as a statement, but a powerful defense could be made of the claim that what Curtis thinks should be done to the British Empire is what happens a generation later. I shall give here only two recent examples of this. In 1911 Curtis decided that the name of His Majesty's Dominions must be changed from "British Empire" to "Commonwealth of Nations." This was done officially in 1948. Again, about 1911 Curtis decided that India must be given complete self-government as rapidly as conditions permitted. This was carried out in 1947. As we shall see, these are not merely coincidental events, for Curtis, working behind the scenes, has been one of the chief architects of the present Commonwealth. It is not easy to discern the places where he has passed, and no adequate biographical sketch can be put on paper here. Indeed, much of the rest of this volume will be a contribution to the biography of Lionel Curtis. Burning with an unquenchable ardor, which some might call fanatical, he has devoted his life to his dominant idea, that the finer things of life-liberty, democracy, toleration, etc.could be preserved only within an integrated world political system, and that this political system could be constructed about Great Britain, but only if Britain adopted toward her Dominions, her colonies, and the rest of the world a policy of generosity, of trust, and of developing freedom. Curtis was both a fanatic and an idealist. But he was not merely "a man in a hurry." He had a fairly clear picture of what he wanted. He did not believe that complete and immediate freedom and democracy could be given to the various parts of the imperial system, but felt that they could only be extended to these parts in accordance with their ability to develop to a level where they were capable of exercising such privileges. When that level was achieved and those privileges were extended, he felt that they would not be used to disrupt the integrated world system of which he dreamed, but to integrate it more fully and in a sounder fashion-a fashion based on common outlook and common patterns of thought rather than on the dangerous unity of political subjection, censorship, or any kind of duress. To Curtis, as to H. G. Wells, man's fate depended on a race between education and disaster. This was similar to the feeling which animated Rhodes when he established the Rhodes Scholarships, although Curtis has a much broader and less nationalistic point of view than Rhodes. Moreover, Curtis believed that people could be educated for freedom and responsibility by giving them always a little more freedom, a little more democracy, and a little more responsibility than they were quite ready to handle. This is a basically Christian attitude the belief that if men are trusted they will prove trustworthy--but it was an attitude on which Curtis was prepared to risk the existence of the British Empire. It is not yet clear whether Curtis is the creator of the Commonwealth of Nations or merely the destroyer of the British Empire. The answer will be found in the behavior of India in the next few years. The Milner Group knew this. That is why India, since 1913, has been the chief object of their attentions .

These ideas of Curtis are clearly stated in his numerous published works. The following quotations are taken from The Problem of the Commonwealth drawn up by the Round Table Group and published under Curtis's name in 1916:

"Responsible government can only be realized for any body of citizens in so far as they are fit for the exercise of political power. In the Dependencies the great majority of the citizens are not as yet capable of governing themselves and for them the path to freedom is primarily a problem of education. . . . The Commonwealth is a typical section of human society including every race and level of civilization organized in one state. In this world commonwealth the function of government is reserved to the European minority, for the unanswerable reason that for the present this portion of its citizens is alone capable of the task-civilized states are obliged to assume control of backward communities to protect them from exploitation by private adventurers from Europe.... The Commonwealth cannot, like despotisms, rest content with establishing order within and between the communities it includes. It must by its nature prepare these communities first to maintain order within themselves. The rule of law must be rooted in the habits and wills of the peoples themselves. . . . The peoples of India and Egypt, no less than those of the British Isles and Dominions, must be gradually schooled to the management of their national affairs. . . . It is not enough that free communities should submit their relations to the rule of law. Until all those people control that law the principle by which the commonwealth exists is unfulfilled. The task of preparing for freedom the races which cannot as yet govern themselves is the supreme duty of those races who can. It is the spiritual end for which the Commonwealth exists, and material order is nothing except a means to it. . . . In India the rule of law is firmly established. Its maintenance is a trust which rests on the government of the Commonwealth until such time as there are Indians enough able to discharge it. India may contain leaders qualified not only to make but also to administer laws, but she will not be ripe for self-government until she contains an electorate qualified to recognize those leaders and place them in office. . . . For England the change is indeed a great one. Can she face it? Can she bear to lose her life, as she knows it, to find it in a Commonwealth, wide as the world itself, a life greater and nobler than before? Will she fail at this second and last crisis of her fate, as she failed at the first, like Athens and Prussia, forsaking freedom for power, thinking the shadow more real than the light, and esteeming the muckrake more than the crown?"

Four years later, in 1920, Curtis wrote: "The whole effect of the war has been to bring movements long gathering to a sudden head . . . companionship in arms has fanned . . . long smoldering resentment against the prescription that Europeans are destined to dominate the rest of the world. In every part of Asia and Africa it is bursting into flames. . . . Personally, I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome especially to ourselves." [5] Unfortunately for the world, Curtis, and the Milner Group generally, had one grave weakness that may prove fatal. Skilled as they were in political and personal relations, endowed with fortune, education, and family connections, they were all fantastically ignorant of economics-even those, like Brand or Hichens, who were regarded within the Group as its experts on this subject. Brand was a financier, while Hichens was a businessman-in both cases occupations that guarantee nothing in the way of economic knowledge or understanding.

Curtis was registered as an undergraduate at New College for fourteen years (1891-1905) because he was too busy to take time to get his degree. This is undoubtedly also the reason he was admitted to All Souls so belatedly, since an ordinary fellowship requires as a qualification the possession either of a university prize or of a first-class honours degree. By the time Curtis took his degree he had fought in the Boer War, been Town Clerk of Johannesburg, and been assistant secretary for local government in the Transvaal. In 1906 he resigned his official positions to organize "Closer Union Groups" agitating for a federation of South Africa. When this work was well started, he became a member of the Transvaal Legislative Council and wrote the Transvaal draft of a projected constitution for such a federation. In 1910-1912, and at various times subsequently, he traveled about the world, organizing Round Table Groups in the Dominions and India. In 1912 he was chosen Belt Lecturer in Colonial History at Oxford, but gave it up in 1913 to turn his attention for almost six years to the preparatory work for the Government of India Act of 1919. He was secretary to the Irish Conference of 1921 (arranged by General Smuts) and was adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office for the next three years. in 1919 he was one of the chief if not the chief, founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and during the 1920s divided his attention between this and the League of Nations-in neither case, however, in a fashion to attract public attention. Undoubtedly his influence within the Milner Group declined after 1922, the preponderance falling into the hands of Lothian, Brand, and Dawson. The failure to achieve federation within the Empire was undoubtedly a blow to his personal feeling and possibly to his prestige within the Group. Nonetheless, his influence remained great, and still is. In the 1920s he moved to Kidlington, near Oxford, and thus was available for the Group conferences held at All Souls. His chief published works include The Problem of the Commonwealth (1915), The Commonwealth of Nations (1916), Dyarchy (1920), The Prevention of War (1924), the Capital Question of China (1932), The Commonwealth of God (1932-1938), and The Protectorates of South Africa (1935).

John Dove (1872-1934) was sent to Milner in 1903 by Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls. He was assistant Town Clerk and later Clerk of Johannesburg (1903-1907) and then chairman of the Transvaal Land Settlement Board (1907-1909). After a trip to Australia and India with Lionel Curtis, for the purpose of organizing Round Table Groups, he returned to London in 1911 and lived with Brand and Kerr in Cumberland Mansions. He went to South Africa with Earl Grey in 1912 to unveil the Rhodes Memorial, and served in the First World War with military intelligence in France. In 1918 he became a kind of traveling representative of financial houses, probably as a result of his relationship with Brand. He began this with an extended trip to India for the Commonwealth Trust Company in 1918 and in the next fifteen years made almost annual trips to Europe. Editor of The Round Table from 1921 to his death in 1934, he displayed an idealistic streak similar to that found in Curtis but without the same driving spirit behind it. After his death, Brand published a volume of his letters (1938). These are chiefly descriptive of foreign scenes, the majority written to Brand himself.

Leopold Amery was not a member of the Kindergarten but knew all the members well and was in South Africa, during their period of service, as chief correspondent of The Times for the Boer War and the editor of The Times History of the South African War (which appeared in seven volumes in the decade 1900-1909). Amery, who was a Fellow of All Souls for fourteen years early in the century and has been one again since 1938, is one of the inner core of the Milner Group. He started his career as private secretary to Leonard H. Courtney, Unionist Member of Parliament and Deputy Speaker in Lord Salisbury's second government. Through this connection, Amery was added to The Times editorial staff (1899-1909) and would have become editor but for his decision to go into politics. In this he was not, at first, successful, losing three contests as a Unionist and tariff reformer in the high tide of Liberal supremacy (1906-1910). When victory came in 1911, it was a good one, for Amery held the same seat (for Birmingham) for thirty-four years. During that time he held more important government posts than can be mentioned here. These included the following: assistant secretary of the War Cabinet and Imperial War Council (1917); secretary to the Secretary of State for War (Milner, 1917-1918) Parliamentary Under Secretary for Colonies (1919-1921); Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty (1921-1922) First Lord of the Admiralty (1922-1924) Secretary of State for Colonies (1924-1929) and for Dominion Affairs (1925-1929) Secretary of State for India and Burma (1940-1945). Amery wrote dozens of volumes, chiefly on the Empire and imperial trade relations. In 1910 he married the sister of a fellow Member of Parliament, Florence Greenwood. The colleague, Hamar Greenwood (Baron Greenwood since 1929 and Viscount Greenwood since 1937), was a Liberal M.P. for sixteen years (1906-1922) and a Conservative M.P. for five (1924-1929), a change in which Amery undoubtedly played an important role. Lord Greenwood was secretary of the Overseas Trade Department (1919-1920) and Chief Secretary for Ireland (1920-1922). In recent years he has been chairman of the board of directors of one of England's greatest steel firms (Dorman, Long, and Company), treasurer of the Conservative Party, and president of the British Iron and Steel Federation (1938-1939).

Amery can be regarded as Milner's political heir. From the beginning of his own political career in 1906 to the death of Milner in 1925, he was more closely associated with Milner's active political life than any other person. In 1906, when Amery made his first effort to be elected to Parliament, Milner worked actively in support of his candidacy. It is probable that this, in spite of Milner's personal prestige, lost more votes than it gained, for Milner made no effort to conceal his own highly unorthodox ideas. On 17 December 1906, for example, he spoke at Wolverhampton as follows: "Not only am I an Imperialist of the deepest dye and Imperialism, you know, is out of fashion but I actually believe in universal military training. . . . I am a Tariff Reformer and one of a somewhat pronounced type. . . . I am unable to join in the hue and cry against Socialism. That there is an odious form of Socialism I admit, a Socialism which attacks wealth simply because it is wealth, and lives on the cultivation of class hatred. But that is not the whole story; most assuredly not. There is a nobler Socialism, which so far from springing from envy, hatred, and uncharitableness, is born of genuine sympathy and a lofty and wise conception of what is meant by national life." These sentiments may not have won Amery many votes, but they were largely shared by him, and his associations with Milner became steadily more intimate. In his last years of public office, Milner was generally assisted by Amery (1917-1921), and when he died it was Amery who arranged the public memorial service and controlled the distribution of tickets.

Edward William Mackay Grigg (Sir Edward after 1920, Lord Altrincham since 1945) is one of the most important members of the Milner Group. On graduating from New College, he joined the staff of The Times and remained with it for ten years (1903-1913), except for an interval during which he went to South Africa. In 1913 he became joint editor of The Round Table, but eventually left to fight the war in the Grenadier Guards. In 1919, he went with the Prince of Wales on a tour of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. After replacing Kerr for a year or so as secretary to Lloyd George (1921-1922), he was a Member of Parliament in 1922-1925 and again in 1933-1945. He has also been Governor of Kenya Colony (1925-1931), parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Information (1939-1940), Joint Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for War (1940-1942), and Minister Resident in the Middle East (1944-1945). He also found time to write many books, such as The Greatest Experiment in History (1924) Three Parties or Two? (1931), The Faith of an Englishman (1931), Britain Looks at Germany (1938), The British Commonwealth (1943), and British Foreign Policy (1944).

Another visitor to South Africa during the period of the Kindergarten was H. A. L. Fisher. Fisher, a famous historian in his own right, can be regarded as one of the founders of the Kindergarten and was a member of the Milner Group from at least 1899. The chief recruiting for the Kindergarten, beyond that done by Milner himself, was done by Fisher and his close friend Sir William Anson. The relationships between these two, Goschen, and Milner were quite close (except that Milner and Anson were by no means close), and this quartet had a great deal to do with the formation of the Milner Group and with giving it a powerful hold on New College and All Souls. Fisher graduated from New College in 1888 and at once became fellow and tutor in the same college. These positions were held, with interruptions, until 1912, when Fisher left Oxford to become Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. He returned to New College as Warden for the last fifteen years of his life (1925-1940). Fisher originally expected to tutor in philosophy, but his appointment required him to teach history. His knowledge in this field was scanty, so it was amplified by vacation reading with A. L. Smith (the future Master of Balliol, an older contemporary of Milner's at Balliol, and a member of the Milner Group). Smith, in addition to teaching Fisher history, also taught him how to skate and to ride a bicycle and worked with him on the literary remains of Fisher's brother-in-law, Frederic W. Maitland, the great historian of the English law. As a result of this last activity, Fisher produced in 1911 a three-volume set of Maitland's Collected Works, and a biographical sketch of Maitland (1910), while Smith in 1908 published two lectures and a bibliography on Maitland. Smith's own biographical sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was written by another member of the Milner Group, Kenneth Norman Bell (Fellow of All Souls, 1907-1914; Belt Lecturer in Colonial History, 1924-1927; and member of the family that controlled the publishing house of G. Bell and Sons). His son, Arthur Lionel Foster Smith, was a Fellow of All Souls under Anson (1904-1908) and later organized and supervised the educational system of Mesopotamia (1920-1931).

H. A. L. Fisher held many important posts in his career, partly because of membership in the Milner Group. In 1908, while the Kindergarten, which he had helped to assemble, was still in South Africa, he went there on an extended lecture tour; in 1911-1912 he was Chichele Lecturer in Foreign History; in 1912-1915 he was an important member of the Royal Commission on Public Services in India; in 1916-1926 he was a member of the House of Commons, the first half of the period as a Cabinet member (President of the Board of Education, 1916-1922). He was a delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations for three years (1920-1922), governor of the British Broad casting Corporation for four (1935-1939), and a Rhodes Trustee for about fifteen (1925-1940).[6]

Fisher's bibliography forms an extensive list of published works. Besides his Unfinished Biography (1840) and his famous three-volume History of Europe (1935-1936), it contains many writings on subjects close to the Milner Group. His Creighton Lecture in 1911 on Political Unions examines the nature of federalism and other unions and fits in well with the discussions going on at the time within Round Table Groups on this subject - discussions in which Fisher played an important part. In the section of this lecture dealing with the Union of South Africa, Fisher was almost as deliberately evasive as Brand had been in his book on the Union, which appeared two years earlier. He mentions the preliminary work of the Kindergarten toward union (work in which he had taken a part himself during his visit to South Africa in 1908) as the work of anonymous persons, but does state that the resulting constitution for a united South Africa was largely the work of the Transvaal delegation (which, as we shall see, was one controlled by the Kindergarten).

Other writings of Fisher's resulting from his work with the Milner Group are his "Imperial Administration" in Studies in History and Politics (1920) his An International Experiment, dealing with the League of Nations (1921) The Common Weal, dealing with the duties of citizenship (1924) and Our New Religion (1929), dealing with Christian Science. In connection with this last book, it might be mentioned that Christian Science became the religion of the Milner Group after Milner's death. Among others, Nancy Astor and Lord Lothian were ardent supporters of the new belief. Christian Science was part of the atmosphere of Cliveden.

Fisher's relationship with Milner was quite close and appeared chiefly in their possession of fellowships in New College, obtained by the older man in 1878 and by the younger ten years later. In 1901, when the Kindergarten was formed, the two had been Fellows together for thirteen years, and in 1925, when Milner died and Fisher became Warden, they had been Fellows together for thirty-seven years.

There was also a more personal relationship, created in 1899, when Fisher married Lettice Ilbert. Her father, Sir Courtenay Ilbert (1841-1924), was a lifelong friend of Anson and an old friend of Milner. Sir Courtenay, as law member of the Viceroy of India's Council in 1883, had tried in vain to remove from the Indian code "every judicial disqualification based merely upon race distinctions." Under Lord Dufferin (Lord Basil Blackwood's father), he set up the general system of law and procedure for Burma (1885), and in 1898 he issued what became the basic codification of Indian law. He was clerk of the House of Commons from 1902 to 1921. Mrs. H. A. L. Fisher, one of Sir Courtenay's five daughters, recalls in The Milner Papers how Alfred Milner use to romp with the girls when they were children.

Fisher was a very valuable member of the Milner Group because he, along with Lord Goschen, become the chief means by which the Group secured access to the College of All Souls. This access was secured by the friendship of these two men with Sir William Anson. Anson himself was a member of the Cecil Bloc rather than the Milner Group. His personal relations with Milner were not very close, and, indeed, there is some doubt as to his actual feeling toward Milner. The only comment about Milner in the published portions of Anson's journal is a rather acid remark regarding the lack of eloquence in a Milner speech in the House of Lords against the Parliament Act of 1911.[7] Nor did Anson see eye to eye with Milner, or indeed with most members of the Milner Group, since he was much too conservative. He was, to be sure, a Liberal Unionist, as most important members of the Group were. He was also an imperialist and interested in social welfare, but he did not have the high disregard for systems of economics that is so characteristic of all members of the Group before 1917. Anson had an ingrained respect for the economic status quo, and the old Liberal's suspicion of the intervention by public authority in the economic field. These tendencies had been strengthened by years of tender attention to the extensive landed wealth possessed by All Souls. Nonetheless, Anson became one of the chief architects of the Milner Group and is undoubtedly the chief factor in the Group's domination of All Souls since Anson's death. During his wardenship (1881-1914), Anson was the most influential figure in All Souls, not merely in its social and intellectual life but also in the management of its fortune and the selection of its members. In the ordinary expectation of affairs, the former task was generally left in the hands of the estates bursar, and the latter was shared with the other Fellows. Anson, however, took the dominant role in both matters, to such a degree in fact that Bishop Henson (himself a member of All Souls since 1884), in his Memoir of Anson, says that the Warden was always able to have his candidate emerge with the prized fellowship.

In seeking to bestow fellowships at All Souls on those individuals whom we now regard as the chief members of the Milner Group, Anson was not conscious that he was dealing with a group at all. The candidates who were offering themselves from New College in the period 1897-1907 were of such high ability that they were able to obtain the election on their own merits. The fact that they came strongly recommended by Fisher served to clinch the matter. They thus did not enter All Souls as members of the Milner Group-at least not in Anson's lifetime. After 1914 this was probably done (as in the case of Lionel Curtis in 1921, Basil Williams in 1924, or Reginald Coupland in 1920), but not before. Rather, likely young men who went to New College in the period on either side of the Boer War were marked out by Fisher and Anson, elected to All Souls, and sent into Milner's Kindergarten on the basis of merit rather than connections.

Another young man who came to visit in South Africa in 1904 and 1905 was Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, already a Fellow of All Souls and a future member of the Milner Group. Better known to the world today as the first Earl of Halifax, he was the son of the second Viscount Halifax and in every way well qualified to become a member of the Milner Group. Lord Halifax is a great-grandson of Lord Grey of the great Reform Bill of 1832, and a grandson of Lord Grey's secretary and son-in-law, Charles Wood (1800-1885), who helped put the Reform Bill through. The same grandfather became, in 1859-1866, the first Secretary of State for the new India, putting through reforms for that great empire which were the basis for the later reforms of the Milner Group in the twentieth century. Lord Halifax is also a grand nephew of Lord Durham, whose famous report became the basis for the federation of Canada in 1867.

As Edward Wood, the future Lord Halifax undoubtedly found his path into the select company of All Souls smoothed by his own father's close friendship with Phillimore and with the future Archbishop Lang, who had been a Fellow for fifteen years when Wood was elected in 1903.

As a newly elected Fellow, Wood went on a world tour, which took him to South Africa twice (in 1904 and 1905). Each time, he was accompanied by his father, Viscount Halifax, who dined with Milner and was deeply impressed. The Viscount subsequently became Milner's chief defender in the House of Lords. In 1906, for example, when Milner was under severe criticism in the Commons for importing Chinese laborers into South Africa, Lord Halifax introduced and carried in the Upper House a resolution of appreciation for Milner's work.

Edward Wood's subsequent career is one of the most illustrious of contemporary Englishmen. A Member of Parliament for fifteen years (1910-1925), he held posts as Parliamentary Under Secretary for the Colonies (1921-1922), President of the Board of Education (in succession to H. A. L. Fisher, 1922-1924), and Minister of Agriculture, before he went to India (as Baron Irwin) to be Viceroy. In this post, as we shall see, he furthered the plans of the Milner Group for the great subcontinent (1926-1931), before returning to more brilliant achievements as president of the Board of Education (1932-1935), Secretary of State for War (1935), Lord Privy Seal (1935-1937), Lord President of the Council (1937-1938), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1938-1940), and, finally, Ambassador to Washington (as successor to Lord Lothian, 1941-1946). In Washington, as we shall see, he filled the embassy with members of All Souls College.

There can be little doubt that Lord Halifax owed much of his rise in public affairs to his membership in the Milner Group. His authorized biographer, Alan Campbell Johnson, write in connection with one appointment of Halifax's: "It is widely believed that the influence of Geoffrey Dawson and other members of The Times editorial staff discovered him as an ideal Viceroy and whispered his name at the proper time both to the proper authorities in George V's entourage and at 10 Downing Street." In connection with his appointment as Foreign Secretary, Johnson says:

Lothian, Geoffrey Dawson, and Brand, who used to congregate at Cliveden House as the Astors' guests and earned the title of a "set," to which, in spite of imaginative left-wing propaganda, they never aspired, urged Chamberlain at the decisive moment to have the courage of his convictions and place Halifax, even though he was a Peer, in the office to which his experience and record so richly entitled him. They argued forcibly that to have a Foreign Secretary safely removed from the heat of the House of Commons battle was just what was required to meet the delicate international situation.

Another member of this South African group who was not technically a member of the Kindergarten (because not a member of the civil service) was Basil Kellett Long. He went from Brasenose to Cape Town to study law in 1902 and was called to the bar three years later. In 1908 he was elected to the Cape Parliament, and a year later succeeded Kerr as editor of the Kindergarten's propagandist journal, The State (1909-1912). He was a member of the first Parliament of a united South Africa for three years (1910-1913) and then succeeded Amery as head of the Dominions Department of The Times. In 1921 he left this post and the position of foreign editor (held jointly with it in 1920-1921) to return to South Africa as editor of the Cape Tines (1921-1935). He was one of the most important figures in the South African Institute of International Affairs after its belated foundation. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he was put in charge of liaison work between the South African branch and the parent institute in London.

The work of the Kindergarten in South Africa is not so well known as might be expected. Indeed, until very recently the role played by this group, because of its own deliberate policy of secrecy, has been largely concealed. The only good narration of their work is to be found in Worsfold's The Reconstruction of the New Colonies under Lord Milner, but Worsfold, writing so early, could not foresee the continued existence of the Kindergarten as a geater and more influential group. Lionel Curtis's own account of what the Group did, in his Letter to the People of India (1917), is very brief and virtually unknown in the United States or even in England. The more recent standard accounts, such as that in Volume VIII of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (1936), give even less then Worsfold. This will not appear surprising when we point out that the chapter in this tome dealing with "The Formation of the Union, 1901-1910" is written by Hugh A. Wyndham, a member of the Kindergarten. It is one of the marvels of modern British scholarship how the Milner Group has been able to keep control of the writing of history concerned with those fields in which it has been most active.

Only in very recent years has the role played by the Kindergarten as part of a larger group been appreciated, and now only by a very few writers, such as the biographer of Lord Halifax, already mentioned, and M. S. Green. The latter, a high school teacher in Pretoria, South Africa, in his brief work on The Making of the Union of South Africa (1946) gives an account of the Kindergarten which clearly shows his realization that this was only the early stages of a greater group that exercised its influence through The Round Table, The Times, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the College of All Souls.

The work of union in South Africa was only part of the much greater task of imperial union. This was always the ultimate goal of Cecil Rhodes, of Milner, and of the Kindergarten. Milner wrote in his diary on 25 January 1904: "My work has been constantly directed to a great and distant end-the establishment in South Africa of a great and civilized and progressive community, one from Cape Town to the Zambesi independent in the management of its own affairs, but still remaining, from its own firm desire, a member of the great community of free nations gathered together under the British flag. That has been the object of all my efforts. It is my object still."[8] In his great farewell speech of March 1905, Milner called upon his hearers, and especially the Kindergarten, to remain loyal to this ultimate goal. He said:

"What I pray for hardest is, that those with whom 1 have worked in a great struggle and who may attach some weight to my words should remain faithful, faithful above all in the period of reaction, to the great idea of Imperial Unity. Shall we ever live to see its fulfillment Whether we do or not, whether we succeed or fail, I shall always be steadfast in that faith, though I should prefer to work quietly and in the background, in the formation of opinion rather than in the exercise of power. . . . When we who call ourselves Imperialists talk of the British Empire, we think of a group of states, all independent in their local concerns, but all united for the defense of their own common interests and the development of a common civilization; united, not in an alliance -for alliances can be made and unmade, and are never more than nominally lasting but in a permanent organic union. Of such a union the dominions as they exist today, are, we fully admit, only the raw material. Our ideal is still distant but we deny that it is either visionary or unattainable. . . . The road is long, the obstacles are many, the goal may not be reached in my lifetime--perhaps not in that of any man in this room. You cannot hasten the slow growth of a great idea like that by any forcing process. But what you can do is to keep it steadily in view, to lose no opportunity to work for it, to resist like grim death any policy which leads away from it. I know that the service of that idea requires the rarest combination of qualities, a combination of ceaseless effort with infinite patience. But then think on the other hand of the greatness of the reward; the immense privilege of being allowed to contribute in any way to the fulfillment of one of the noblest conceptions which has ever dawned on the political imagination of mankind."

For the first couple of years in South Africa the Kindergarten worked to build up the administrative, judicial, educational, and economic systems of South Africa. By 1905 they were already working for the Union. The first steps were the Intercolonial Council, which linked the Transvaal and Orange River Colony; the Central South African Railway amalgamation; and the customs union. As we have seen, the Kindergarten controlled the first two of these completely; in addition, they controlled the administration of Transvaal completely. This was important, because the gold and diamond mines made this colony the decisive economic power in South Africa, and control of this power gave the Kindergarten the leverage with which to compel the other states to join a union.

In 1906, Curtis, Dawson, Hichens, Brand, and Kerr, with the support of Feetham and Malcolm, went to Lord Selborne and asked his permission to work for the Union. They prevailed upon Dr. Starr Jameson, at that time Premier of Cape Colony, to write to Selborne in support of the project. When permission was obtained, Curtis resigned from his post in Johannesburg and, with Kerr's assistance, formed "Closer Union Societies" as propaganda bodies throughout South Africa. Dawson, as editor, controlled the Johannesburg Star. The Times of London was controlled completely, as far as news from South Africa was concerned, with Monypenny, Amery, Basil Williams, and Grigg in strategic spots the last as head of the imperial department of the paper. Fabian Ware published articles by various members of the Milner Group in his Morning Post. In South Africa, 5000 pounds was obtained from Abe Bailey to found a monthly paper to further the cause of union. This paper, The State, was edited by Philip Kerr and B. K. Long and became the predecessor of The Round Table, also edited by Kerr and financed by Bailey. Bailey was not only the chief financial support of the Kindergarten's activities for closer union in South Africa, but also the first financial contributor to The Round Table in 1910, and to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919. He contributed to both during his life, and at his death in 1940 gave The Round Table 1000 pounds a year for an indefinite period. He had given the Royal Institute 5000 pound a year in perpetuity in 1928. Like his close associates Rhodes and Belt, he left part of his immense fortune in the form of a trust fund to further imperial interests. In Bailey's case, the fund amounted to 250,000 pounds.

As part of the project toward a Union of South Africa, Curtis in 1906 drew up a memorandum on the need for closer union of the South African territories, basing his arguments chiefly on the need for greater railway and customs unity. This, with the addition of a section written by Kerr on railway rates, and a few paragraphs by Selborne, was issued with the famous Selborne Federation Dispatch of 7 January 1907 and published as an Imperial Blue Book (Cmd. 3564 of 1907). It was republished, with an introduction by Basil Williams of the Kindergarten, by Oxford University Press in 1925. The Central Committee of the Closer Union Societies (which was nothing but the Kindergarten) wrote a complete and detailed account of the political institutions of the various areas concerned. This was called The Government of South Africa and was issued anonymously in five parts, and revised later in two quarto volumes. A copy was sent to every delegate to the National Convention in Durban in 1908, along with another anonymous work (edited by B. K. Long), called The Framework of Union. This latter work contained copies of the five chief federal constitutions of the world (United States, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia). Curtis was also the chief author of the draft of projected constitution presented by the Transvaal delegation to the National Convention. This draft, with modifications, became the Constitution of the Union of South Africa in 1910. The Transvaal delegation, alone of the various delegations, lived together in one house and had a body of expert advisers; both of these circumstances were due to the Kindergarten.

After the convention accepted the Union Constitution, it was necessary to have it accepted by the Imperial Parliament and the various states of South Africa. In both of these tasks the Kindergarten played an important role, in England through their control of The Times and The Morning Post as well as other sources of propaganda, and in South Africa by the economic pressure of the Transvaal. In Natal, the only state which submitted the question to a referendum, the Kindergarten put on an intensive propaganda drive, financed with money from the Transvaal. Of this struggle in Natal, Brand, with his usual secrecy on all matters dealing with the Kindergarten, merely says: "A referendum was therefore taken contrary to general expectation, it revealed an overwhelming majority for union, a good testimony to the sound sense of the people of the colony." [9] Brand, as secretary to the Transvaal delegation to the Convention, knew more than this!

The same secrecy was maintained in regard to the whole convention. No record of its proceedings was kept, but, according to Worsfold, its resolutions were drafted by Brand and Duncan.

Throughout these activities, the Kindergarten received powerful support from a man who by this time was a member of the Milner Group and later gained international fame, chiefly because of this membership. This was Jan C. Smuts. Smuts had studied in England, at Cambridge University and the Middle Temple. By 1895 he was a lawyer in Cape Town. His lack of success in this profession doubtless had some influence in turning him into the devious opportunist he soon became, but throughout his opportunism he clung to that ideal which he shared with Rhodes and Milner-the ideal of a united South Africa. All his actions from this date onward-no matter how much they may seem, viewed superficially, to lead in another direction-were directed toward the end ultimately achieved: a United South Africa within the British Empire -and, to him almost equally important, a United South Africa in which he would be the dominant figure. Smuts and Milner differed chiefly on this last point, for if Milner was "selfless," this was almost the last word which could be applied to Smuts. Otherwise the two seemed very similar similar in their desires for a united South Africa and later a united British Empire, and extraordinarily similar in their cold austerity, impersonal intellectualism, and driving discipline (applied to self even more than to others). In spite of their similar goals for the Empire, Smuts and Milner were not close friends. Perhaps such similar personalities could not be expected to find mutual agreement, but the divergence probably rests, rather, on the one characteristic in their personalities where they most obviously differed.

Smuts and Rhodes, on the other hand, got on together very well. As early as 1895, the unsuccessful Cape Town lawyer was sent by the great imperialist to Kimberley to speak in his defense. But after the Jameson Raid, Smuts became one of the most vociferous critics of Rhodes and the British. These attacks gave Smuts a reputation as an Anglophobe, which yielded considerable profits immediately. Going to the Transvaal (where he added to his fame by uncompromising support of President Kruger), he was raised, at the age of twenty-eight, to the post of State Attorney (1898). In this position, and later as Colonial Secretary, he adopted tactics which led steadily to war (forcing the Uitlanders to pay taxes while denying them the franchise, arresting Uitlander newspaper editors like Monypenny, etc.). At the Bloemfontein Conference of 1899 between Kruger and Milner, all of Smuts's ad vice to the former was in the direction of concessions to Milner, yet it was Smuts who drafted the ultimatum of 9 October, which led to the outbreak of war. During the war he was one of the most famous of Boer generals, yet, when negotiations for peace began, it was he who drew up the proposal to accept the British terms without delay. With the achievement of peace, Smuts refused Milner's invitation to serve in the Legislative Council of the Transvaal, devoting himself instead to violent and unfair attacks on Milner and the Kindergarten, yet as soon as self-government was granted (in 1906) he became Colonial Secretary and Minister of Education and worked in the closest cooperation with the Kindergarten to obtain Milner's ideal of a united South Africa.

There is really nothing puzzling or paradoxical in these actions. From the beginning, Smuts wanted a brilliant career in a united South Africa within a united British Empire, within, if possible, a united world. No stage would be too big for this young actor's ambitions, and these ambitions were not, except for his own personal role, much different from those of Milner or Rhodes. But, as a very intelligent man, Smuts knew that he could play no role whatever in the world, or in the British Empire, unless he could first play a role in South Africa. And that required, in a democratic regime (which he disliked), that he appear pro-Boer rather than pro-British. Thus Smuts was pro-Boer on all prominent and nonessential matters but pro-British on all unobtrusive and essential matters (such as language, secession, defense, etc.).

At the National Convention of 1908-1909, it was Smuts who dominated the Transvaal delegation and succeeded in pushing through the projects prepared by the Kindergarten. From this emerged a personal connection that still exists, and from time onward, as a member of the Milner Group, Smuts, with undeniable ability, was able to play the role he had planned in the Empire and the world. He became the finest example of the Milner Group's contention that within a united Empire rested the best opportunities for freedom and self-development for all men.[10]

In the new government formed after the creation of the Union of South Africa, Smuts held three out of nine portfolios (Mines, Defense, and Interior). In 1912 he gave up two of these (Mines and Interior) in exchange for the portfolio of Finance, which he held until the outbreak of war. As Minister of Defense (1910-1920) and Prime Minister (1919-1924), he commanded the British forces in East Africa (1916-1917) and was the South African representative and one of the chief members of the Imperial War Cabinet (1917-1918). At the Peace Conference at Paris he was a plenipotentiary and played a very important role behind the scenes in cooperation with other members of the Milner Group. In 1921 he went on a secret mission to Ireland and arranged for an armistice and opened negotiations between Lloyd George and the Irish leaders. In the period following the war, his influence in South African politics declined, but he continued to play an important role within the Milner Group and in those matters (such as the Empire) in which the Group was most concerned. With the approach of the Second World War, he again came to prominence in political affairs. He was Minister of Justice until the war began (1933-1939) and then became Prime Minister, holding the Portfolios of

External Affairs and Defense (1939-1948). Throughout his political life, his chief lieutenant was Patrick Duncan, whom he inherited directly from Milner.

Smuts was not the only addition made to the Milner Group by the Kindergarten during its stay in South Africa. Among the others were two men who were imported by Milner from the Indian Civil Service to guide the efforts of the Kindergarten in forming the Transvaal Civil Service. These two were James S. Meston (later Lord Meston, 1865-1943) and William S. Marris (later Sir William, 1873-1945). Both had studied briefly at Oxford in preparation for the Indian Civil Service. Meston studied at Balliol (after graduating from Aberdeen University) at the time when Milner was still very close to the college (c. 1884), and when Toynbee, tutor to Indian Civil Service candidates at Balliol, had just died. It may have been in this fashion that Milner became acquainted with Meston and thus called him to South Africa in 1903. Until that time, Meston's career in the Indian Civil Service had been fairly routine, and after eighteen years of service he had reached the position of Financial Secretary to the United Provinces.

Marris, a younger colleague of Meston's in the Indian Civil Service, was a native of New Zealand and, after studying at Canterbury College in his own country, went to Christ Church, Oxford, to prepare for the Indian Civil Service. He passed the necessary examinations and was made an assistant magistrate in the United Provinces. From this post he went to South Africa to join the Kindergarten two years after Meston had.

Meston's position in South Africa was adviser to the Cape Colony and the Transvaal on civil service reform (1904-1906). He remained ever after a member of the Milner Group, being used especially for advice on Indian affairs. On his return from South Africa, he was made secretary to the Finance Department of the Government of India (1906-1912). Two years later he was made Finance Member of the Governor-General's Council, and, the following year, became a member of the Imperial Legislative Council. In 1912 he became for five years Lieutenant Governor of the United Provinces. During this period he worked very closely with Lionel Curtis on the projected reforms which ultimately became the Government of India Act of 1919. In 1917 Meston went to London as Indian representative to the Imperial War Cabinet and to the Imperial Conference of that year. On his return to India, he again was Finance Member of the Governor-General's Council until his retirement in 1919. He then returned to England and, as the newly created Baron Meston of Agra and Dunottar, continued to act as chief adviser on Indian affairs to the Milner Group. He was placed on the the boards of directors of a score of corporations in which the Group had influence. On several of these he sat with other members of the Group. Among these we might mention the English Electric Company (with Hichens), the Galloway Water Power Company (with Brand), and the British Portland Cement Manufacturers Association (with the third Lord Selborne). From its foundation he was an important member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, was chairman of its executive committee in 1919-1926, and was a member of the council for most of the period 1926-1943.

Marris, who replaced Meston in the Transvaal in 1906, was eight years his junior (born 1873) and, perhaps for this reason, was much closer to the member of the Kindergarten and became, if possible, an even more intimate member of the Milner Group. He became Civil Service Commissioner of the Transvaal and deputy chairman of the Committee on the Central South African Railways. He did not return to India for several years, going with Curtis instead on a world tour through Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, organizing the Round Table Groups (1911). It was he who persuaded Curtis, and through him the Milner Group, that India should be allowed to proceed more rapidly than had been intended on the path toward self-government.

Back in India in 1912, Marris became a member of the Durbar Executive Committee and, later, secretary to the Home Department of the Government of India. In 1916 he became Inspector General of Police for the United Provinces, and the following year Joint Secretary to the Government of India. During this period he helped Curtis with the projected reforms plans, and he was made responsible for carrying them out when the act was passed in 1919, being made Commissioner of Reforms and Home Secretary to the Government of India (1919-1921). At the same time he was knighted. After a brief period as Governor of Assam (1921-1922), he was Governor of the United Provinces (1922-1928) and a member of the Council of India (1928-1929). After his retirement from active participation in the affairs of India, he embarked upon a career in academic administration, which brought him additional honors. He was Principal of Armstrong College in 1929-1937, Vice-Chancellor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Durham University in 1929-1937, a Governor of the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester in 1937-1945.

Marris's son, Adam D. Marris, born in the year his father went to the Transvaal, is today still a member of the Milner Group. After graduating from Winchester School and Trinity College, Oxford, he went to work with Lazard Brothers. There is no doubt that this position was obtained through his father's relationship with Brand, at that time manager of Lazard. Young Marris remained with the banking firm for ten years, but at the outbreak of war he joined the Ministry of Economic Warfare for a year. Then he joined the the All Souls Group that was monopolizing the British Embassy in Washington, originally as First Secretary and later as Counselor to the Embassy (1940-1945). After the war he was British Foreign Office representative on the Emergency Economic Committee for Europe as secretary-general. In 1946 he returned to Lazard Brothers.

The older Marris brought into the Milner Group from the Indian Civil Service another member who has assumed increasing importance in recent years. This was Malcolm Hailey (since 1936 Lord Hailey). Hailey, a year older than Marris, took the Indian Civil Service examinations with Marris in 1895 and followed in his footsteps thereafter. Secretary to the Punjab government in 1907 and Deputy Secretary to the Government of India the following year, he was a member of the Delhi Durbar Committee in 1912 and Chief Commissioner in that city for the next eight years. In this post he was one of the advisers used by Curtis on Indian reforms (1916). After the war Hailey was a member of the Executive Council of the Viceroy in the Financial and Home Departments (1919-1924), Governor of Punjab (1924-1928), and Governor of the United Provinces (1928-1930, 1931-1934). During this last period he was one of the closest advisers to Baron Irwin (Lord Halifax) during his term as Viceroy (1926-1936). After Hailey left the Indian Service in 1934, he was used in many important capacities by the Milner Group, especially in matters concerned with Africa and the mandates. Since this use illustrates to perfection the skillful way in which the Milner Group has functioned in recent years, it might be presented here as a typical case.

We have seen that the Milner Group controlled the Rhodes money after Rhodes's death in 1902. In 1929 the Group invited General Smuts to give the Rhodes Lectures at Oxford. In these lectures, Smuts suggested that a detailed survey of Africa and its resources was badly needed. The Royal Institute of International Affairs took up this suggestion and appointed a committee, with Lord Lothian as chairman, to study the project. This committee secured the services of the retiring Governor of the United Provinces to head the survey. Thus Sir Malcolm Hailey became the director of the project and general editor of the famous African Survey, published in 1938 by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, with funds obtained from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Thus the hand of the Milner Group appears in this work from its first conception to its final fruition, although the general public, ignorant of the existence of such a group, would never realize it.

Hailey was also made a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a member of the Permanent Mandate Commission of the League of Nations (1935-1939), chairman of the School of Oriental and African Studies (1941-1945), chairman of International African Institute, president of the Royal central Asian Society, chairman of the Colonial Research Committee, member of the Senate of the University of London, Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford (1939-1947), head of an economic mission to the Belgian Congo (1941), Romanes Lecturer at Oxford (1941), etc., etc.

Along with all these important posts, Lord Hailey found time to write in those fields with which the Milner Group was most concerned. Among these works we might mention: Britain and Her Dependencies, The Future of Colonial Peoples, and Great Britain, India, and the Colonial Dependencies in the Post-War World (all three published in 1943).

The achievement of the Union of South Africa in 1910 did not mean the end of the Kindergarten. Instead, it set out to repeat on the imperial scene what it had just accomplished in South Africa. In this new project the inspiration was the same (Milner), the personnel was the same (the Kindergarten), the methods were the same (with the Round Table Groups replacing the "Closer Union Societies" and The Round Table replacing The State. But, as befitted a larger problem, additional personnel and additional funds were required. The additional personnel came largely from New College and All Souls; the additional funds came from Cecil Rhodes and his associates and All Souls. The older sources of funds (like Abe Bailey) and influence (like The Times) remained loyal to the Group and continued to assist in this second great battle of the Milner Group. As John Buchan wrote in his autobiography, "Loyalty to Milner and his creed was a strong cement which endured long after our South African service ended, since the Round Table coterie in England continued the Kindergarten." Or, if we may call another competent witness, Lord Oxford and Asquith, writing of Milner after his death, stated: "His personality was so impressive that he founded a school of able young men who during his lifetime and since have acknowledged him as their principal political leader. . . . He was an Expansionist, up to a point a Protectionist, with a strain in social and industrial matters of semi-Socialist sentiment."[11]

More convincing, perhaps, than either Buchan or Asquith is the word of the Group itself. The Round Table, in its issue of September 1935, celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary by printing a brief history of the Group. This sketch, while by no means complete and without mentioning any names of members, provides irrefutable proof of the existence and importance of the Milner Group. It said, in part:

"By the end of 1913 The Round Table had two aspects. On the one hand, it published a quarterly review. . . . On the other hand, it represented a body of men united in support of the principle of freedom and enquiring jointly, through the method of group study, how it could be preserved and expanded in the conditions of the then existing world. In calling for preparation against the German danger (as it did from the very beginning). The Round Table was not merely, or even chiefly, concerned with saving British skins. It was concerned with upholding against the despotic state what it began to call "the principle of the commonwealth." . . . The root principle of The Round Table remained freedom-"the government of men by themselves" and it demanded that within the Empire this principle should be persistently pursued and expressed in institutions. For that reason it denounced the post-war attempt to repress the Irish demand for national self-government by ruthless violence after a century of union had failed to win Irish consent, as a policy in conflict with British wealth; and it played its part in achieving the Irish Treaty, and the Dominion settlement. Within the limits of the practiceable it fought for the Commonwealth ideal in India. It was closely associated with the device of dyarchy, which seemed for the time being the most practical method of preventing the perpetuation of an irremovable executive confronting an irresponsible legislature and of giving Indians practical training in responsibility for government-the device embodied in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report and the Government of India Act. . . . The Round Table, while supporting the legal formulation of national freedom in the shape of Dominion autonomy, has never lost sight of its ultimate ideal of an organic and articulate Commonwealth. The purpose of revolution is not to drive liberty to the point of license but to prepare for the ultimate basis on which alone freedom can be preserved the reign of law over all. . . . Federal Union is the only security for the freedom both of the individual and of the nation. . . The principle of anonymity has never been broken and it remains not only as a means of obtaining material from sources that would otherwise be closed, but also as a guarantee that both the opinions and the facts presented in the articles are scrutinized by more than one individual judgment. . . . Imperceptibly, the form of the review has changed to suit altered circumstances.... But the fundamentals remain unchanged. Groups in the four overseas Dominions still assemble their material and hammer out their views, metaphorically, "round the table." Some of their members have shared continuously in this work for a quarter of a century; and in England, too, the group of friends who came together in South Africa still help to guide the destinies and contribute to the pages of the review they founded, though the chances of life and death have taken some of their number, and others have been brought in to contribute new points of view and younger blood. "

End of Chapter 4

[1] The obituary of Patrick Duncan in The Round Table (September 1943), XXXIII, 303-305, reads in part: "Duncan became the doyen of the band of brothers, Milner's young men, who were nicknamed . . .The Kindergarten, then in the first flush of youthful enthusiasm. It is a fast ageing and dwindling band now; but it has played a part in the Union of South Africa colonies, and it is responsible for the foundation and conduct of The Round Table. For forty years and more, so far as the vicissitudes of life have allowed, it has kept together; and always, while looking up to Lord Milner and to his successor in South Africa, the late Lord Selborne, as its political Chief, has revered Patrick Duncan as the Captain of the band." According to R. H. Brand, ed., The Letters of John Dove (London, 1938), Duncan was coming to England to the meetings of the Group as late was 1932. <return>

[2]The above list of eighteen names does not contain all the members of the Kindergarten. A complete list would include: (1) Harry Wilson (Sir Harry after 1908), who was a "Seeley lecturer" with Parkin in the 1890s; was chief private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain in 1895-1897; was legal adviser to the Colonial Office and to Milner in 1887-1901; was Secretary and Colonial Secretary to the Orange River Colony in 1901-1907; was a member of the Intercolonial Council and of the Railway Committee in 1903-1907. (2) E. B. Sargant, who organized the school system of South Africa for Milner in 1900-1904 and was Director of Education for both the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in 1902-1904; he wrote a chapter for The Empire and the Century in 1905. (3) Gerard Craig Sellar, who died in 1929, and on whom no information is available. There was a Craig-Sellar Fellowship in his honor at Balliol in 1946. (4) Oscar Ferris Watkins, a Bible Clerk at All Souls at the end of the nineteenth century, received a M.A. from this college in 1910; he was in the South African Constabulary in 1902-1904 was in the Transvaal Civil Service in 1904-1907; was in the East African Protectorate Service and the E.A. Civil Service from 1908, being a District Commissioner in 1914, Acting Chief Native Commissioner in 1920-1927, a member of the Legislative Council in 1920-1922, Deputy Chief Native Commissioner of Kenya in 1921-1927; he was Director of Military Labour under Smuts in German East Africa in 1914-1918. (5) Percy Girouard (later Sir Percy) was chairman of the Egyptian Railway Board in 1898-1890 was Director of Railways in the Beer War in 1899-1902; was Commissioner of Railways and Head of the Central South African Railways in 1902-1904; was High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria in 1907-1908 and Governor in 1908-1909; was Governor of the East African Protectorate in 1909-1912; was director of Armstrong, Whitworth and Company in 1912-1915; and was Director General of Munitions Supply in 1914-1915. He was fired by Lloyd George for inefficiency in 1915. <return>

[3] Douglas Malcolm's sister in 1907 married Neill Malcolm (since 1919 Major General Sir Neill Malcolm), who was a regular army officer from 1889 to his retirement in 1924. We was on the British Military Mission to Berlin in 1919-1921; Commanding General in Malaya, 1921-1924; a founder of the RIIA, of which he was chairman from 1926 (succeeding Lord Meston) to 1935 (succeeded by Lord Astor). He was High Commissioner for German Refugees in 1936-1938, with R. M. Makins (member of All Souls and the Milner Group and later British Minister in Washington) as his chief British subordinate. He is president of the British North Borneo Company, of which Dougal Malcolm is vice-president. <return>

Ian Malcolm (Sir Ian since 1919), a brother of Neill Malcolm, was an attache: at Berlin, Paris, and Petersburg in 1891-1896; and M.P. in 1895-1906 and again 1910-1919; assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury (1895-1900); parliamentary private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland (George Wyndham) in 1901-190& Secretary to the Union Defence League, organized by Welter Long, in 1906-1910 a Red Cross officer in Europe and North America (1914-1917) on Balfour's mission to the United States in 1917; private secretary to Balfour during the Peace Conference (1919) and British representative on the Board of Directors of the Suez Canal Company. He wrote Welter Long's biography in the Dictionary of National Biography. <return>

[4] See W. B. Worsfold, The Reconstruction of the New Colonies under Lord Milner (2 vols., London, 1913), II, 207-222 and 302-419. <return>

[5] The last quotation is from Dyarchy (Oxford, 1920), liii. The other are from The Problem of the Commonwealth (London, 1915), 18, and 200-219. <return>

[6] Fisher was one of the most important members of the Milner Group, a fact which would never be gathered from the recent biography written by David Ogg, Herbert Fisher, 1865-1940 (London, 1947). He was associated with members of the Group, or persons close to it all his life. At New College in the period 1884-1888, he was a student of W. L. Courtney, whose widow, Dame Janet Courtney, was later close to the Group. He became a Fellow of New College in 1888, along with Gilbert Murray, also a member of the Group. His pupils at New College included Curtis, Kerr, Brand, Malcolm, and Hichens in the first few years of teaching; the invitation to South Africa in 1908 came through Curtis; his articles on the trip were published in The Times. He sailed to India in 1913 with Herbert Baker of the Group (Rhodes's architect). He refused the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1918, so it was given to Amery's brother-in-law; he refused the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in December 1918, when Robert Cecil resigned. He played a certain role in drafting the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1919 and the Government of Ireland Bill of 1921, and piloted the latter through Commons. He refused the post of Ambassador to Washington in 1919. Nevertheless, he did not see eye to eye with the inner core of the Group on either religion or protection, since he was an atheist and a free-trader to the end. His book on Christian Science almost caused a break with some members of the Group. <return>

[7] H. H. Henson, Memoirs of Sir William Anson (Oxford, 1920), 212. <return>

[8] Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers, 1897-1905 (2 vols., London, 1931-1933), II, 501. <return>

[9] R. H. Brand, The Union of South Africa (Oxford, 1909), 39. <return>

[10] Smuts was frequently used by the Milner Group to enunciate its policies in public (as, for example, in his speeches of 15 May 1917 and 13 November 1934). The fact that he was speaking for the Milner Group was generally recognized by the upper classes in England, was largely ignored by the masses in England, and was virtually unknown to Americans. Lord Davies assumed this as beyond the need of proof in an article which he published in The Nineteenth Century in January 1935. He was attacking the Milner Group's belief that British defense could be based on the Dominions and the United States and especially on its efforts to reduce the League of Nations to a simple debating society. He pointed out the need for an international police force, then asked, "Will the Dominions and the United States volunteer as special constables? And, if they refuse, does it mean that Great Britain is precluded from doing so? The reply of The Round Table is 'yes,' and the most recent exposition of its policy is contained in the speech delivered by General Smuts at the dinner given in his honor by the Royal Institute of International Affairs on November 13"The Nineteenth Century January 1935), CXVII, 51. <return>

Smuts's way in imperial affairs was much smoothed by the high opinion which Lord Esher held of him; see, for example, The Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), IV, 101, 224, and 254.

[11] Lord Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections 1852-1927 (2 vols., Boston, 1928), I, 213-214. Asquith was a member of the Cecil Bloc and of "The Souls." He was a lifelong friend of both Balfour and Milner. It was the former who persuaded Asquith to write his memoirs, after talking the matter over privately with Margot Asquith one evening while Asquith himself was at Grillions. When Asquith married Margot Tennant in 1894, the witnesses who signed the marriage certificates were A. I. Balfour, W.E.Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Charles Tennant, H.J.Tennant, and R. B. Haldane. Asquith's friendship with Milner went back to their undergraduate days.In his autobiography Asquith wrote (pp. 210-211): "We sat together at the Scholar's table in Hall for three years. We then formed a close friendship, and were for many years on intimate terms and in almost constant contact with one another. . . At Oxford we both took an active part at the Union in upholding the un fashionable Liberal cause. . . .In my early married days [1877-1885] he used often to come to my house at Hampstead for a frugal Sunday supper when we talked over political and literary matters, for the most part in general agree met." For Milner's relationship with Margot Tennant before her marriage to Asquith in 1894, see her second fling at autobiography, More or Less about Myself (London, 1932). On 22 April 1908, W.T.Stead wrote to Lord Esher that Mrs. Asquith had three portraits over her bed: Rosebery, Balfour, and Milner. See The Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (4 vols., London, 1938), II, 304. <return>

[12] Brandt, Daniel, Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy: What's going on here?, From NameBase NewsLine, No. 1, April-June 1993, http://www.pir.org/newsline.01<return>

[13] Quigley, Carroll (1910-1977), Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World In Our Time, Macmillan Company, New York, 1966, pg 950<return>

[14] Larry Abraham, Call it Conspiracy, Double A. Publications, Seattle Washington, 1985, 92; Joseph Kraft (member of CFR), Harper's magazine July 1958; George J.A. O'Toole, Honorable Treachery, A History of US Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA, A Morgan Entrekin Book The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York (1991) pg 273; Brandt, Daniel, Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy: What's going on here?Public Information Research, April 1993, Inc.Blythe Systems,339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 Voice telephone: (212) 979-0471; <return>

[15] Quigley, Carroll (1910-1977), The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981, Books In Focus, NY, NY pg. 3 [ Quigley footnotes this information to W. T. Stead, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes (London, 1902); Sir Francis Wylie's three articles in the American Oxonian (April 1944), XXXI, 65-69; (July 1944), XXXI, 129-138; and (January 1945), XXXII, 1-11; F. Aydelotte, The American Rhodes Scholars (Princeton, 1946); and the biographies and memoirs of the men mentioned.<return>

[16] Quigley, Carroll (1910-1977), The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981, Books In Focus, NY, NY pg.49 [ Quigley footnotes Cecil Headlam, ed., The Milner Papers, 1897-1905 (2 vols. London, 1931-1933), II, 412-413; the unpublished material is at New College, Oxford, in Milner papers, XXXVIII, ii, 200]<return>

[17] Quigley, Carroll (1910-1977), The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981, Books In Focus, NY, NY pgs 4-5<return>