to 1928. He is a brother-in-law and lifelong friend of Lord Halifax, having married the
Honourable Mary Wood in 1903.
The most extraordinary fact about the Simon Commission was the lack of
qualification possessed by its members. Except for the undoubted advantages of
education at Eton and Oxford, the members had no obvious claims to membership on any
committee considering Indian affairs. Indeed, not one of the eight members had had any
previous contact with this subject. Nevertheless, the commission produced an enormous
two-volume report which stands as a monumental source book for the study of Indian
problems in this period. When, to the lack of qualifications of its members, we add the
fact that the commission was almost completely boycotted by Indians and obtained its
chief contact with the natives by listening to their monotonous chants of "Simon, go
back," it seems more than a miracle that such a valuable report could have emerged from
their investigations. The explanation is to be found in the fact that they received full
cooperation from the staff of the Government of India, including members of the Milner
Group.
It is clear that by the end of 1928 the Milner Group, as a result of the strong Indian
opposition to the Simon Commission, the internal struggle within that commission
between Simon and Burnham (because of the latter's refusal to go as far as the former
desired in the direction of concessions to the Indians), and their inability to obtain
cooperation from the Secretary of State (as revealed in the steady criticism of Birkenhead
in The Times), had decided to abandon the commission method of procedure in favor of a
round-table method of procedure. It is not surprising that the Round Table Groups should
prefer a roundtable method of procedure even in regard to Indian affairs, where many of
the participants would have relatively little experience in the typical British procedure of
agreement through conference. To the Milner Group, the round-table method was not
only preferable in itself but was made absolutely necessary by the widespread Indian
criticism of the Simon Commission for its exclusively British personnel. This restriction
had been adopted originally on the grounds that only a purely British and purely
parliamentary commission could commit Parliament in some degree to acceptance of the
recommendations of the commission—at least, this was the defense of the restricted
membership made to the Indians by the Viceroy on 8 November 1927. In place of this
argument, the Milner Group now advanced a somewhat more typical idea, namely, that
only Indian participation on a direct and equal basis could commit Indians to any plans
for the future of India. By customary Milner Group reasoning, they decided that the
responsibility placed on Indians by making them participate in the formulation of plans
would moderate the extremism of their demands and bind them to participate in the
execution of these plans after they were enacted into law. This basic idea—that if you
have faith in people, they will prove worthy of that faith, or, expressed in somewhat more
concrete terms, that if you give dissatisfied people voluntarily more than they expect and,
above all, before they really expect to get it, they will not abuse the gift but will be
sobered simultaneously by the weight of responsibility and the sweetness of gratitude—
was an underlying assumption of the Milner Group's activities from 1901 to the present.
Its validity was defended (when proof was demanded) by a historical example—that is,
by contrasting the lack of generosity in Britain's treatment of the American Colonies in
1774 with the generosity in her treatment of the Canadian Colonies in 1839. The contrast
between the "Intolerable Acts" and the Durham Report was one of the basic ideas at the
back of the minds of all the important members of the Milner Group. In many of those
minds, however, this assumption was not based on political history at all but had a more
profound and largely unconscious basis in the teachings of Christ and the Sermon on the
Mount. This was especially true of Lionel Curtis, John Dove, Lord Lothian, and Lord
Halifax. Unless this idea is recognized, it is not possible to see the underlying unity
behind the actions of the Group toward the Boers in 1901-1910, toward India in 1919 and
1935, and toward Hitler in 1934-1939.
These ideas as a justification of concessions to India are to be found in Milner Group
discussions of the Indian problem at all periods, especially just before the Act of 1919. A
decade later they were still exerting their influence. They will be found, for example, in
advocated the use of the round-table method but warned that it must be based on
complete equality for the Indian members. It continued: "Indians should share equally
with Great Britain the responsibility for reaching or failing to reach an agreement as to