the real problems were of a technical and material nature and that Britain's ability to
produce goods should be limited only by the real supply of knowledge, labor, energy, and
materials and not by the artificial limitations of a deliberately restricted supply of money
and credit. This point of view of Milner's was not accepted by the Group until after 1931,
and not as completely as by Milner even then. The point of view of the Group, at least in
the period 1918-1931, was the point of view of the international bankers with whom
Brand, Hichens, and others were so closely connected. This point of view, which
believed that Britain's prewar financial supremacy could be restored merely by
reestablishing the prewar financial system, with the pound sterling at its prewar parity,
failed completely to see the changed conditions that made all efforts to restore the prewar
system impossible. The Group's point of view is clearly revealed in
articles of the period. In the issue of December 1918, Brand advocated the financial
policy which the British government followed, with such disastrous results, for the next
thirteen years. He wrote:
“That nation will recover quickest after the war which corrects soonest any
depreciation in currency, reduces by production and saving its inflated credit, brings
down its level of prices, and restores the free import and export of gold.... With all our
wealth of financial knowledge and experience behind us it should be easy for us to steer
the right path—though it will not be always a pleasant one—amongst the dangers of the
future. Every consideration leads to the view that the restoration of the gold standard—
whether or not it can be achieved quickly—should be our aim. Only by that means can
we be secure that our level of prices shall be as low as or lower than prices in other
countries, and on that condition depends the recovery of our export trade and the
prevention of excessive imports. Only by that means can we provide against and abolish
the depreciation of our currency which, though the [existing] prohibition against dealings
in gold prevents our measuring it, almost certainly exists, and safeguard ourself against
excessive grants of credit.”
He then outlined a detailed program to contract credit, curtail government spending,
raise taxes, curtail imports, increase exports, etc. (15) Hichens, who, as an industrialist
rather than a banker, was not nearly so conservative in financial matters as Brand,
suggested that the huge public debt of 1919 be met by a capital levy, but, when Brand's
policies were adopted by the government, Hichens went along with them and sought a
way out for his own business by reducing costs by "rationalization of production."
These differences of opinion on economic matters within the Group did not disrupt the
Group, because it was founded on political rather than economic ideas and its roots were
to be found in ancient Athens rather than in modern Manchester. The Balliol generation,
from Jowett and Nettleship, and the New College generation, from Zimmern, obtained an
idealistic picture of classical Greece which left them nostalgic for the fifth century of
Hellenism and drove them to seek to reestablish that ancient fellowship of intellect and
patriotism in modern Britain. The funeral oration of Pericles became their political
covenant with destiny, Duty to the state and loyalty to one's fellow citizens became the
chief values of life. But, realizing that the jewel of Hellenism was destroyed by its
inability to organize any political unit larger than a single city, the Milner Group saw the
necessity of political organization in order to insure the continued existence of freedom
and higher ethical values and hoped to be able to preserve the values of their day by
organizing the whole world around the British Empire.
Curtis puts this quite clearly in
“States, whether autocracies or commonwealths, ultimately rest on duty, not on self-
interest or force.... The quickening principle of a state is a sense of devotion, an adequate
recognition somewhere in the minds of its subjects that their own interests are
subordinate to those of the state. The bond which unites them and constitutes them
collectively as a state is, to use the words of Lincoln, in the nature of dedication. Its
validity, like that of the marriage tie, is at root not contractual but sacramental. Its
foundation is not self-interest, but rather some sense of obligation, however conceived,
which is strong enough to over-master self-interest.” (16)
History for this Group, and especially for Curtis, presented itself as an age-long
struggle between the principles of autocracy and the principles of commonwealth,
between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, between Asiatic theocracy and
European freedom. This view of history, founded on the work of Zimmern, E. A.