Anglo-American Establishment полностью

that the responsibility rests upon him of seeing that the Indian demands are

sympathetically handled without delay after the war."(22)

What this Group feared was that the British Empire would fail to profit from the

lessons they had discerned in the Athenian empire or in the American Revolution.

Zimmern had pointed out to them the sharp contrast between the high idealism of

Pericles's funeral oration and the crass tyranny of the Athenian empire. They feared that

the British Empire might fall into the same difficulty and destroy British idealism and

British liberties by the tyranny necessary to hold on to a reluctant Empire. And any effort

to hold an empire by tyranny they regarded as doomed to failure. Britain would be

destroyed, as Athens was destroyed, by powers more tyrannical than herself. And, still

drawing parallels with ancient Greece, the Group feared that all culture and civilization

would go down to destruction because of our inability to construct some kind of political

unit larger than the national state, just as Greek culture and civilization in the fourth

century B.C. went down to destruction because of the Greeks’ inability to construct some

kind of political unit larger than the city-state. This was the fear that had animated

Rhodes, and it was the same fear that was driving the Milner Group to transform the

British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations and then place that system within a

League of Nations. In 1917, Curtis wrote in his Letter to the People of India: "The world

is in throes which precede creation or death. Our whole race has outgrown the merely

national state, and as surely as day follows night or night the day, will pass either to a

Commonwealth of Nations or else an empire of slaves. And the issue of these agonies

rests with us."

At the same time the example of the American Revolution showed the Group the

dangers of trying to rule the Empire from London: to tax without representation could

only lead to disruption. Yet it was no longer possible that 45 million in the United

Kingdom could tax themselves for the defense of 435 million in the British Empire.

What, then, was the solution? The Milner Group's efforts to answer this question led

eventually, as we shall see in Chapter 8, to the present Commonwealth of Nations, but

before we leave The Round Table, a few words should be said about Lord Milner's

personal connection with the Round Table Group and the Group's other connections in

the field of journalism and publicity.

Milner was the creator of the Round Table Group (since this is but another name for

the Kindergarten) and remained in close personal contact with it for the rest of his life. In

the sketch of Milner in the Dictionary of National Biography, written by Basil Williams

of the Kindergarten, we read: "He was always ready to discuss national questions on a

non-party basis, joining with former members of his South African 'Kindergarten' in their

'moot,' from which originated the political review, The Round Table, and in a more

heterogeneous society, the 'Coefficients,' where he discussed social and imperial

problems with such curiously assorted members as L. S. Amery, H. G. Wells, (Lord)

Haldane, Sir Edward Grey, (Sir) Michael Sadler, Bernard Shaw, J. L. Garvin, William

Pember Reeves, and W. A. S. Hewins." In the obituary of Hichens, as already indicated,

we find in reference to the Round Table the sentence: "Often at its head sat the old

masters of the Kindergarten, Lord Milner and his successor, Lord Selborne, close friends

and allies of Hichens to the end." And in the obituary of Lord Milner in The Round Table

for June 1925, we find the following significant passage:

“The founders and the editors of The Round Table mourn in a very special sense the

death of Lord Milner. For with him they have lost not only a much beloved friend, but

one whom they have always regarded as their leader. Most of them had the great good

fortune to serve under him in South Africa during or after the South African war, and to

learn at firsthand from him something of the great ideals which inspired him. From those

days at the very beginning of this century right up to the present time, through the days of

Crown Colony Government in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, of the making of the

South African constitution, and through all the varied and momentous history of the

British Empire in the succeeding fifteen years, they have had the advantage of Lord

Milner's counsel and guidance, and they are grateful to think that, though at times he

disagreed with them, he never ceased to regard himself as the leader to whom, above

everyone else, they looked. It is of melancholy interest to recall that Lord Milner had

undertaken to come on May 13, the very day of his death, to a meeting specially to

discuss with them South African problems.”