Anglo-American Establishment полностью

There was a somewhat greater divergence in regard to methods, and the circulating of

memoranda within the Group to evoke various comments was for the purpose of reaching

some agreement on methods only—the goals being already given. In this, meetings of the

Group were rather like the meetings of the British Cabinet, although any normal Cabinet

would contain a greater variety of opinion than did the usual meetings of the Group. In

general, an expression of opinion by any one member of the Group sounded like an echo

of any of the others. Their systems of values were identical; the position of the British

Commonwealth at the apex of that system was almost axiomatic; the important role

played by moral and ideological influences in the Commonwealth and in the value

system was accepted by all; the necessity of strengthening the bonds of the

Commonwealth in view of the approaching crisis of the civilization of the West was

accepted by all, so also was the need for closer union with the United States. There was

considerable divergence of opinion regarding the practicality of imperial federation in the

immediate future; there was some divergence of ideas regarding the rate at which self-

government should be extended to the various parts of the Empire (especially India).

There was a slight difference of emphasis on the importance of relations between the

Commonwealth and the United States. But none of these differences of opinion was

fundamental or important. The most basic divergence within the Group during the first

twenty years or so was to be found in the field of economic ideas—a field in which the

Group as a whole was extremely weak, and also extremely conservative. This divergence

existed, however, solely because of the extremely unorthodox character of Lord Milner's

ideas. Milner's ideas (as expressed, for example, in his book Questions of the Hour,

published in 1923) would have been progressive, even unorthodox, in 1935. They were

naturally ahead of the times in 1923, and they were certainly far ahead of the ideas of the

Group as a whole, for its economic ideas would have been old-fashioned in 1905. These

ideas of the Group (until 1931, at least) were those of late-nineteenth-century

international banking and financial capitalism. The key to all economics and prosperity

was considered to rest in banking and finance. With "sound money," a balanced budget,

and the international gold standard, it was expected that prosperity and rising standards of

living would follow automatically. These ideas were propagated through The Round

Table, in the period after 1912, in a series of articles written by Brand and

subsequently republished under his name, with the title War and National Finance

(1921). They are directly antithetical to the ideas of Milner as revealed in his book

published two years later. Milner insisted that financial questions must be subordinated to

economic questions and economic questions to political questions. As a result, if a

deflationary policy, initiated for financial reasons, has deleterious economic or political

effects, it must be abandoned. Milner regarded the financial policy advocated by Brand in

1919 and followed by the British government for the next twelve years as a disaster, since

it led to unemployment, depression, and ruination of the export trade. instead, Milner

wanted to isolate the British economy from the world economy by tariffs and other

barriers and encourage the economic development of the United Kingdom by a system of

government spending, self-regulated capital and labor, social welfare, etc. This program,

which was based on "monopoly capitalism" or even "national socialism" rather than

"financial capitalism," as Brand's was, was embraced by most of the Milner Group after

September 1931, when the ending of the gold standard in Britain proved once and for all

that Brand's financial program of 1919 was a complete disaster and quite unworkable. As

a result, in the years after 1931 the businessmen of the Milner Group embarked on a

policy of government encouragement of self-regulated monopoly capitalism. This was

relatively easy for many members of the Group because of the distrust of economic

individualism which they had inherited from Toynbee and Milner. In April 1932, when P.

Horsfall, manager of Lazard Brothers Bank (a colleague of Brand), asked John Dove to

write a defense of individualism in The Round Table, Dove suggested that he write it

himself, but, in reporting the incident to Brand, he clearly indicated that the Group

regarded individualism as obsolete. (8)

This difference of opinion between Milner and Brand on economic questions is not of

great importance. The important matter is that Brand's opinion prevailed within the