what the next step in Indian constitutional development should be. It is no longer a
question, as we see it, of Great Britain listening to Indian representatives and then
deciding for herself what the next Indian constitution should be.... The core of the round
table idea is that representative Britons and representative Indians should endeavour to
reach an agreement, on the understanding that if they can reach an agreement, each will
loyally carry it through to completion, as was the case with Ireland in 1922." As seen by
the Milner Group, Britain's responsibility was
“her obligation to help Indians to take maximum responsibility for India's government
on their own shoulders, and to insist on their doing so, not only because it is the right
thing in itself, but because it is the most certain antidote to the real danger of anarchy
which threatens India unless Indians do learn to carry responsibility for government at a
very early date There is less risk in going too fast in agreement and cooperation with
political India than in going at a more moderate pace without its agreement and
cooperation. Indeed, in our view, the most successful foundation for the Round Table
Conference would be that Great Britain should ask the Indian delegates to table agreed
proposals and then do her utmost to accept them and place on Indian shoulders the
responsibility for carrying them into effect.”
It is very doubtful if the Milner Group could have substituted the round-table method
for the commission method in quite so abrupt a fashion as it did, had not a Labour
government come to office early in 1929. As a result, the difficult Lord Birkenhead was
replaced as Secretary of State by the much more cooperative Mr. Wedgewood Benn
(Viscount Stansgate since 1941). The greater degree of cooperation which the Milner
Group received from Benn than from Birkenhead may be explained by the fact that their
hopes for India were not far distant from those held in certain circles of the Labour Party.
It may also be explained by the fact that Wedgewood Benn was considerably closer, in a
social sense, to the Milner Group than was Birkenhead. Benn had been a Liberal M.P.
from 1906 to 1927; his brother Sir Ernest Benn, the publisher, had been close to the
Milner Group in the Ministry of Munitions in 1916-1917 and in the Ministry of
Reconstruction in 1917-1918; and his nephew John, oldest son of Sir Ernest, married the
oldest daughter of Maurice Hankey in 1929. Whatever the cause, or combination of
causes, Lord Irwin's suggestion that the round-table method be adopted was accepted by
the Labour government. The suggestion was made when the Viceroy returned to London
in June 1929, months before the Simon Report was drafted and a year before it was
published. With this suggestion Lord Irwin combined another, that the government
formally announce that its goal for India was "Dominion status." The plan leaked out,
probably because the Labour government had to consult with the Liberal Party, on which
its majority depended. The Liberals (Lord Reading and Lloyd George) advised against
the announcement, but Irwin was instructed to make it on his return to India in October.
Lord Birkenhead heard of the plan and wrote a vigorous letter of protest to
When Geoffrey Dawson refused to publish it, it appeared in the
repeating the experience of Lord Lansdowne's even more famous letter of 1917.
Lord Irwin's announcement of the Round Table Conference and of the goal of
Dominion status, made in India on 31 October 1929, brought a storm of protest in
England. It was rejected by Lord Reading
and Lloyd George for the Liberals and by Lord Birkenhead and Stanley Baldwin for the
Conservatives. It is highly unlikely that the Milner Group were much disturbed by this
storm. The reason is that the members of the Croup had already decided that "Dominion
status" had two meanings—one meaning for Englishmen, and a second, rather different,
meaning for Indians. As Lord Irwin wrote in a private memorandum in November 1929:
“To the English conception, Dominion Status now connotes, as indeed the word itself
implies, an achieved constitutional position of complete freedom and immunity from
interference by His Majesty's Government in London.... The Indian seems generally to
mean something different. . . . The underlying element in much of Indian political
thought seems to have been the desire that, by free conference between Great Britain and
India, a constitution should be fashioned which may contain within itself the seed of full
Dominion Status, growing naturally to its full development in accordance with the
particular circumstances of India, without the necessity—the implications of which the
Indian mind resents—of further periodic enquiries by way of Commission. What is to the
Englishman an accomplished process is to the Indian rather a declaration of right, from
which future and complete enjoyment of Dominion privilege will spring.” (3)