16.
community is to be found throughout the Milner Group. See, for example, Lord Grey's
violent retort to a Canadian (who tried to belittle A. J. Glazebrook because he made no
real effort to accumulate wealth) in
1941 issue). The same idea was advocated by Hichens and Milner to settle the problems
of management and labor within the industrial system. In a speech at Swanwick in 1919,
the former said: "The industrial problem is primarily a moral one.... If we have rights, we
also have duties.... In the industrial world our duty clearly is to regard our work as the
Service which we render to the rest of the community, and it is obvious that we should
give, not grudgingly or of necessity but in full measure"
1940, XXXI, 11). Milner's views are in
17. In the August 1911 issue of
"There are at present two codes of international morality—the British or Anglo-Saxon
and the continental or German. Both cannot prevail. If the British Empire is not strong
enough to be a real influence for fair dealing between nations, the reactionary standards
of the German bureaucracy will triumph, and it will then only be a question of time
before the British Empire itself is victimized by an international 'hold-up' on the lines of
the Agadir incident. Unless the British peoples are strong enough to make it impossible
for backward rivals to attack them with any prospect of success, they will have to accept
the political standards of the aggressive military powers" (
1911, I, 422-423). What a disaster for the world that Lord Lothian, in March 1936, was
not able to take to heart his own words written twenty-five years earlier!
18. As a matter of fact, one American Rhodes Scholar was a Negro; the experiment
was not a success, not because of any objections by the English, but because of the
objections of other American Rhodes Scholars.
19. L. Curtis,
20.
21.
22. The quotations from Curtis will be found in
(London, 1916), 181 and 176; also
18-19; the quotation from Dove is in a long letter to Brand, dated 9 September 1919, in
statement will be found in L. Curtis,
at King's College in 1915, published in
attacks jingo-imperialism, racial superiority, and national conceit as "Prussian heresy"
and adds: "That the spirit of Prussia has brooded over this land is proved by the shortest
examination of the history of Ireland." He then attacks the Little Englanders and
economic or commercial imperialism, giving shocking examples of their effects on native
lives and cultures. He concludes: "The one thing you cannot do, if you are a human
being, is to do nothing. Civilization cannot stand on one side and see native tribes
destroyed by so-called civilized looters and marauders, or as the result of the free
introduction of firearms, drink, and other instruments of vice. He decides that Britain, by
following a middle ground, has "created not an Empire but a Commonwealth" and
defines the latter as a community activated by the spirit "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
(
same volume on pp. 95-97. Kerr had expressed somewhat similar sentiments in a speech
before the Canadian Round Table in Toronto, 30 July 1912. This was published by
Glazebrook as a pamphlet (Toronto, 1917).
23. The quotations from A. L. Smith are from
1916), 29-30.
Chapter 8
1. The success of the Group in getting the foreign policy they wanted under a Liberal
government may be explained by the pressure from without through
assistance from within through Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, and through the less obvious
but no less important work of persons like Sir Eyre Crowe and above all Lord Esher.
2. During this period Lord Esher played a vital but still mysterious role in the
government. He was a strong supporter of Milner and his Group and was an influential
adviser of Lloyd George. On 12 November 1917, he had a long walk with his protege,