Anglo-American Establishment полностью

calculated assault on the Boers in 1895 and 1899, gave the second (and worse) Germany

the opportunity to criticize and attack Britain and gave it the arguments with which to

justify a German effort to build up naval defenses. The Times, by quoting these attacks

and actions representative of the real attitude and actual intentions of all Germans, misled

the British people and abandoned the good Germans to a hopeless minority position,

where to be progressive, peaceful, or Anglophile was to be a traitor to Germany itself.

Chirol's alienation of Baron von Eckardstein (one of the "good" Germans, married to an

English lady), in a conversation in February 1900,(14) shows exactly how The Times

attitude was contributing to consolidate and alienate the Germans by the mere fact of

insisting that they were consolidated and alienated—and doing this to a man who loved

England and hated the reactionary elements in Germany more than Chirol ever did.

Chapter 7—TheRoundTable

The second important propaganda effort of the Milner Group in the period after 1909

was The Round Table. This was part of an effort by the circle of the Milner Group to

accomplish for the whole Empire what they had just done for South Africa. The leaders

were Philip Kerr in London, as secretary of the London group, and Lionel Curtis

throughout the world, as organizing secretary for the whole movement, but most of the

members of the Kindergarten cooperated in the project. The plan of procedure was the

same as that which had worked so successfully in South Africa—that is, to form local

groups of influential men to agitate for imperial federation and to keep in touch with

these groups by correspondence and by the circulation of a periodical. As in South

Africa, the original cost of the periodical was paid by Abe Bailey. This journal, issued

quarterly, was called The Round Table, and the same name was applied to the local

groups.

Of these local groups, the most important by far was the one in London. In this, Kerr

and Brand were the chief figures. The other local groups, also called Round Tables, were

set up by Lionel Curtis and others in South Africa, in Canada, in New Zealand, in

Australia, and, in a rather rudimentary fashion and somewhat later, in India.

The reasons for doing this were described by Curtis himself in 1917 in A Letter to the

People ofIndia, as follows: "We feared that South Africa might abstain from a future war

with Germany, on the grounds that they had not participated in the decision to make

war.... Confronted by this dilemma at the very moment of attaining Dominion self-

government, we thought it would be wise to ask people in the oldest and most

experienced of all Dominions what they thought of the matter. So in 1909, Mr. Kerr and I

went to Canada and persuaded Mr. Marris, who was then on leave, to accompany us.”(1)

On this trip the three young men covered a good portion of the Dominion. One day,

during a walk through the forests on the Pacific slopes of the Canadian Rockies, Marris

convinced Curtis that "self-government, . . . however far distant, was the only intelligible

goal of British policy in India.... The existence of political unrest in India, far from being

a reason for pessimism, was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest

failings, had not shirked their primary duty of extending Western education to India and

so preparing Indians to govern themselves." "I have since looked back on this walk,"

wrote Curtis, "as one of the milestones of my own education. So far I had thought of self-

government as a Western institution, which was and would always remain peculiar to the

peoples of Europe.... It was from that moment that I first began to think of 'the

Government of each by each and of all by all’ not merely as a principle of Western life,

but rather of all human life, as the goal to which all human societies must tend. It was

from that moment that I began to think of the British Commonwealth as the greatest

instrument ever devised for enabling that principle to be realized, not merely for the

children of Europe, but for all races and kindreds and peoples and tongues. And it is for

that reason that I have ceased to speak of the British Empire and called the book in which

I published my views The Commonwealth of Nations."

Because of Curtis's position and future influence, this walk in Canada was important

not only in his personal life but also in the future history of the British Empire. It needs

only to be pointed out that India received complete self-government in 1947 and the

British Commonwealth changed its name officially to Commonwealth of Nations in

1948. There can be no doubt that both of these events resulted in no small degree from

the influence of Lionel Curtis and the Milner Group, in which he was a major figure.

Curtis and his friends stayed in Canada for four months. Then Curtis returned to South