Anglo-American Establishment полностью

Group from 1919 to 1931, while Milner's has grown in importance from 1931 to the

present. The importance of this can be seen in the fact that the financial and economic

policy followed by the British government from 1919 to 1945 runs exactly parallel to the

policy of the Milner Group. This is no accident but is the result, as we shall see, of the

dominant position held by the Milner Group in the councils of the Conservative-Unionist

party since the First World War.

During the first decade or so of its existence, The Round Table continued to be edited

and written by the inner circle of the Milner Group, chiefly by Lothian, Brand, Hichens,

Grigg, Dawson, Fisher, and Dove. Curtis was too busy with the other activities of the

Group to devote much time to the magazine and had little to do with it until after the war.

By that time a number of others had been added to the Group, chiefly as writers of

occasional articles. Most of these were members or future members of All Souls; they

include Coupland, Zimmern, Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Salter, Sir Maurice Hankey, and

others. The same Group that originally started the project in 1910 still controls it today,

with the normal changes caused by death or old age. The vacancies resulting from these

causes have been filled by new recruits from All Souls. It would appear that Coupland

and Brand are the most influential figures today. The following list gives the editors of

The Round Table from 1910 to the recent past:

Philip Kerr, 1910-1917 (assisted by E. Grigg, 1913-1915)

Reginald Coupland, 1917-1919

Lionel Curtis, 1919-1921

John Dove, 1921-1934

Henry V. Hodson, 1934-1939

Vincent Todd Harlow, (acting editor) 1938

Reginald Coupland, 1939-1941

Geoffrey Dawson, 1941-1944

Of these names, all but two are already familiar. H. V. Hodson, a recent recruit to the

Milner Group, was taken from All Souls. Born in 1906, he was at Balliol for three years

(1925-1928) and on graduation obtained a fellowship to All Souls, which he held for the

regular term (1928-1935). This fellowship opened to him the opportunities which he had

the ability to exploit. On the staff of the Economic Advisory Council from 1930 to 1931

and an important member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, he was assistant

editor of The Round Table for three years (1931-1934) and became editor when Dove

died in 1934. At the same time he wrote for Toynbee the economic sections of the Survey

ofInternational Affairs from 1929 on, publishing these in a modified form as a separate

volume, with the title Slump and Recovery, 1929-1937, in 1938. With the outbreak of the

Second World War in 1939, he left The Round Table editorship and went to the Ministry

of Information (which was controlled completely by the Milner Group) as director of the

Empire Division. After two years in this post he was given the more critical position of

Reforms Commissioner in the Government of India for two years (1941-1942) and then

was made assistant secretary and later head of the non-munitions division of the Ministry

of Production. This position was held until the war ended, three years later. He then

returned to private life as assistant editor of The Sunday Times. In addition to the writings

already mentioned, he published The Economics of a Changing World (1933) and The

Empire in the World (1937), and edited The British Commonwealth and the Future

(1939).

Vincent T. Harlow, born in 1898, was in the Royal Field Artillery in 1917-1919 and

then went to Brasenose, where he took his degree in 1923. He was lecturer in Modern

History at University College, Southampton, in 1923-1927, and then came into the magic

circle of the Milner Group. He was keeper of Rhodes House Library in 1928-1938, Beit

Lecturer in Imperial History in 1930-1935, and has been Rhodes Professor of Imperial

History at the University of London since 1938. He was a member of the Imperial

Committee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and, during the war, was head of

the Empire Information Service at the Ministry of Information. He lives near Oxford,

apparently in order to keep in contact with the Group.

In the decade 1910-1920, the inner circle of the Milner Group was busy with two

other important activities in addition to The Round Table magazine. These were studies

of the problem of imperial federation and of the problem of extending self-government to

India. Both of these were in charge of Lionel Curtis and continued with little interruption

from the war itself. The Round Table, which was in charge of Kerr, never interrupted its

publication, but from 1915 onward it became a secondary issue to winning the war and

making the peace. The problem of imperial federation will be discussed here and in

Chapter 8, the war and the peace in Chapter 7, and the problem of India in Chapter 10.