from his return from India to the end of the war (1942-1945). Douglas P. T. Jay, a
graduate of New College in 1930 and a Fellow of All Souls in the next seven years, was
on the staff of
of
1941-1943 and principal assistant secretary to the Board of Trade in 1943-1945. After the
Labour government came to power in the summer of 1945, he was personal assistant to
the Prime Minister (Clement Attlee) until he became a Labour M.P. in 1946. Richard
Pares, son of the famous authority on Russia, the late Sir Bernard Pares, and son-in-law
of the famous historian Sir Maurice Powicke, was a Fellow of All Souls for twenty-one
years after he graduated from Balliol in 1924. He was a lecturer at New College for
eleven years, 1929-1940 and then was with the Board of Trade for the duration of the
war, 1940-1945. Since the war, he has been Professor of History at Edinburgh. During
most of the war his father, Sir Bernard Pares, lectured in the United States as a pro-
Russian propagandist in the pay of the Ministry of Information. We have already
mentioned the brief period in which Adam Marris worked for the Ministry of Economic
Warfare in 1939-1940.
As the war went on, the Milner Group shifted their attention increasingly to the
subject of postwar planning and reconstruction. Much of this was conducted through
Chatham House. When the war began, Toynbee wrote a letter to the Council of the RIIA,
in which he said: "If we get through the present crisis and are given a further chance to
try and put the world in order, we shall then feel a need to take a broader and deeper view
of our problems than we were inclined to take after the War of 1914-1918.... I believe this
possibility has been in Mr. Lionel Curtis's mind since the time when he first conceived
the idea of the Institute; his
of this historical background to the study of contemporary international affairs." (2) At
the end of 1942 the Group founded a quarterly journal devoted to reconstruction. It was
founded technically under the auspices of the London School of Economics, but the
editor was G. N. Clark, a member of All Souls since 1912 and Chichele Professor of
Economic History from 1931 to 1943. The title of this journal was
editorial offices were in Chatham House. These tentative plans to dominate the postwar
reconstruction efforts received a rude jolt in August 1945, when the General Election
removed the Conservative government from power and brought to office a Labour
government. The influence of the Group in Labour circles has always been rather slight.
Since this blow, the Milner Group has been in eclipse, and it is not clear what has been
happening.(3) Its control of
Rhodes Trust, of All Souls, and of Oxford generally has continued but has been used
without centralized purpose or conviction. Most of the original members of the Group
have retired from active affairs; the newer recruits have not the experience or the
intellectual conviction, or the social contacts, which allowed the older members to wield
such great power. The disasters into which the Group directed British policy in the years
before 1940 are not such as to allow their prestige to continue undiminished. In imperial
affairs, their policies have been largely a failure, with Ireland gone, India divided and
going, Burma drifting away, and even South Africa more distant than at any time since
1910. In foreign policy their actions almost destroyed western civilization, or at least the
European center of it. The Times has lost its influence;
Far worse than this, those parts of Oxford where the Group's influence was strongest have
suffered a disastrous decline. The Montague Burton Professorship of International
Relations, to which Professor Zimmern and later Professor Woodward brought such great
talents, was given in 1948 to a middle-aged spinster, daughter of Sir James Headlam-
Morley, with one published work to her credit. The Chichele Professorship of
International Law and Diplomacy, held with distinction for twenty-five years by
Professor James L. Briefly, was filled in 1947 by a common-law lawyer, a specialist in
the law of real property, who, by his own confession, is largely ignorant of international
law and whose sole published work, written with the collaboration of a specialist on
equity, is a treatise on the
academic circles in the United States, do not allow an outside observer to feel any great
optimism for the future either of the Milner Group or of the great institutions which it has