The Pacific Council, 1930
Jerome D. Greene of the United States
F. W. Eggleston of Australia
N. W. Rowell of Canada
D. Z. T. Yui of China
Lionel Curtis of the United Kingdom
I. Nitobe of Japan
Sir James Allen of New Zealand
The close relationships among all these organizations can be seen from a tour of
inspection which Lionel Curtis and Ivison S. Macadam (secretary of Chatham House, in
succession to F. B. Bourdillon, since 1929) made in 1938. They not only visited the
Institutes of International Affairs of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada but attended the
Princeton meeting of the Pacific Council of the IPR. Then they separated, Curtis going to
New York to address the dinner of the Council on Foreign Relations and visit the
Carnegie Foundation, while Macadam went to Washington to visit the Carnegie
Endowment and the Brookings Institution.
Through the League of Nations, where the influence of the Milner Group was very
great, the RIIA was able to extend its intellectual influence into countries outside the
Commonwealth. This was done, for example, through the Intellectual Cooperation
Organization of the League of Nations. This Organization consisted of two chief parts:
(a) The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory body; and (b)
The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, an executive organ of the
Committee, with headquarters in Paris. The International Committee had about twenty
members from various countries; Gilbert Murray was its chief founder and was chairman
from 1928 to its disbandment in 1945. The International Institute was established by the
French government and handed over to the League of Nations (1926). Its director was
always a Frenchman, but its deputy director and guiding spirit was Alfred Zimmern from
1926 to 1930. It also had a board of directors of six persons; Gilbert Murray was one of
these from 1926.
It is interesting to note that from 1931 to 1939 the Indian representative on the
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. In
1931 he was George V Professor of Philosophy at Calcutta University. His subsequent
career is interesting. He was knighted in 1931, became Spalding Professor of Eastern
Religions and Ethics at Oxford in 1936, and became a Fellow of All Souls in 1944.
Beginning in 1928 at Berlin, Professor Zimmern organized annual round-table
discussion meetings under the auspices of the International Institute of Intellectual
Cooperation. These were called the International Studies Conferences and devoted
themselves to an effort to obtain different national points of view on international
problems. The members of the Studies Conferences were twenty-five organizations.
Twenty of these were Coordinating Committees created for the purpose in twenty
different countries. The other five were the following international organizations: The
Academy of International Law at The Hague; The European Center of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace; the Geneva School of International Studies; the
Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva; the Institute of Pacific Relations. In
two of these five, the influence of the Milner Group and its close allies was preponderant.
In addition, the influence of the Group was decisive in the Coordinating Committees
within the British Commonwealth, especially in the British Coordinating Committee for
International Studies. The members of this committee were named by four agencies, three
of which were controlled by the Milner Group. They were: (1) the RIIA, (2) the London
School of Economics and Political Science, (3) the Department of International Politics at
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and (4) the Montague Burton Chair of
International Relations at Oxford. We have already indicated that the Montague Burton
Chair was largely controlled by the Milner Group, since the Group always had a
preponderance on the board of electors to that chair. This was apparently not assured by
the original structure of this board, and it was changed in the middle 1930s. After the
change, the board had seven electors: (1) the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, ex officio; (2)
the Master of Balliol, ex officio; (3) Viscount Cecil of Chelwood; (4) Gilbert Murray, for
life; (5) B. H. Sumner; (6) Sir Arthur Salter; and (7) Sir. J. Fischer Williams of New
College. Thus, at least four of this board were members of the Group. In 1947 the
electoral board to the Montague Burton Professorship consisted of R. M. Barrington-
Ward (editor of
Headlam-Morley of the Group); Sir Arthur Salter; R. C. K. Ensor; and one vacancy, to be
filled by Balliol College. It was this board, apparently, that named Miss Headlam-Morley
to the Montague Burton Professorship when E. L. Woodward resigned in 1947. As can be
seen, the Milner Group influence was predominant, with only one member out of five
(Ensor) clearly not of the Group.