During the period 1911-1913, as we have said, Curtis was busy in England with the
reports from the Round Table Groups in the Dominions in reply to his printed
memorandum. At the end of 1911 and again in 1913, he printed these reports in two
substantial volumes, without the names of the contributors. These volumes were never
published, but a thousand copies of each were distributed to the various groups. On the
basis of these reports, Curtis drafted a joint report, which was printed and circulated as
each section was completed. It soon became clear that there was no real agreement within
the groups and that imperial federation was not popular in the Dominions. This was a
bitter pill to the Group, especially to Curtis, but he continued to work for several years
more. In 1912, Milner and Kerr went to Canada and made speeches to Round Table
Groups and their associates. The following year Curtis went to Canada to discuss the
status of the inquiry on imperial organization with the various Round Table Groups there
and summed up the results in a speech in Toronto in October 1913.(9) He decided to
draw up four reports as follows: (a) the existing situation; (b) a system involving
complete independence for the Dominions; (c) a plan to secure unity of foreign relations
by each Dominion's following a policy independent from but parallel to that of Britain
itself; (d) a plan to reduce the United Kingdom to a Dominion and create a new imperial
government over all the Dominions. Since the last was what Curtis wanted, he decided to
write that report himself and allow supporters of each of the other three to write theirs. A
thousand copies of this speech were circulated among the groups throughout the world.
When the war broke out in 1914, the reports were not finished, so it was decided to
print the four sections already sent out, with a concluding chapter. A thousand copies of
this, with the title
a popular volume on the subject, with the title
Curtis's name as editor, was published (May 1916). Two months later, the earlier work
(Project) was published under the title
named as editor. Thus appeared for the first time in public the name which the British
Empire was to assume thirty-two years later. In the September 1916 issue of
Round Table Groups. Because of the paper shortage in England, Curtis in 1916 went to
Canada and Australia to arrange for the separate publication of
in Australia and New Zealand. Then he went to India to begin serious work on Indian
reform. From this emerged the Government of India Act of 1919, as we shall see later.
By this time Curtis and the others had come to realize that any formal federation of the
Empire was impossible. As Curtis wrote in 1917 (in his
"The people of the Dominions rightly aspire to control their own foreign affairs and yet
retain their status as British citizens. On the other hand, they detest the idea of paying
taxes to any Imperial Parliament, even to one upon which their own representatives sit.
The inquiry convinced me that, unless they sent members and paid taxes to an Imperial
Parliament, they could not control their foreign affairs and also remain British subjects.
But I do not think that doctrine is more distasteful to them than the idea of having
anything to do with the Government of India."
Reluctantly Curtis and the others postponed the idea of a federated Empire and fell
back on the idea of trying to hold the Empire together by the intangible bonds of common
culture and common outlook. This had originally (in Rhodes and Milner) been a
supplement to the project of a federation. It now became the chief issue, and the idea of
federation fell into a secondary place. At the same time, the idea of federation was
swallowed up in a larger scheme for organizing the whole world within a League of
Nations. This idea had also been held by Rhodes and Milner, but in quite a different
form. To the older men, the world was to be united around the British Empire as a
nucleus. To Curtis, the Empire was to be absorbed into a world organization. This second
idea was fundamentally mystical. Curtis believed: "Die and ye shall be born again." He
sincerely felt that if the British Empire died in the proper way (by spreading liberty,
brotherhood, and justice), it would be born again in a higher level of existence—as a
world community, or, as he called it, a "Commonwealth of Nations." It is not yet clear
whether the resurrection envisaged by Curtis and his associates will occur, or whether