Oxford, which is but one more indication of the way in which the various instruments of
the Milner Group are able to cooperate with one another.
controlled by the Milner Group. At various times in the past, the Group has been very
influential on the staffs of the
most of them, for most of the time, have been quite secretive as to the names of the
members of their staffs or even as to the names of their editors. The extent of the Milner
Group's influence and the periods during which it was active cannot be examined here.
The Milner Group was also very influential in an editorial fashion in regard to a series
of excellent and moderately priced volumes known as The Home University Library.
Any glance at the complete list of volumes in this series will reveal that a large number of
the names are those of persons mentioned in this study. The influence of the Group on
The Home University Library was chiefly exercised through H. A. L.
Fisher, a member of the inner circle of the Group, but the influence, apparently, has
survived his death in 1940.
The Milner Group also attempted, at the beginning at least, to use Milner's old
connections with adult education and working-class schools (a connection derived from
Toynbee and Samuel Barnett) to propagate its imperial doctrines. As A. L. Smith, the
Master of Balliol, put it in 1915, "We must educate our masters." In this connection,
several members of the Round Table Group played an active role in the Oxford Summer
School for Working Class Students in 1913. This was so successful (especially a lecture
on the Empire by Curtis) that a two-week conference was held early in the summer of
1914, "addressed by members of the Round Table Group, and others, on Imperial and
Foreign Problems" (to quote A. L. Smith again). As a result, a plan was drawn up on 30
July 1914 to present similar programs in the 110 tutorial classes existing in industrial
centers. The outbreak of war prevented most of this program from being carried out.
After the war ended, the propaganda work among the British working classes became less
important, for various reasons, of which the chief were that working-class ears were
increasingly monopolized by Labour Party speakers and that the Round Table Group
were busy with other problems like the League of Nations, Ireland, and the United
States.(23)
Chapter 8—War and Peace, 1915-1920
The Milner Group was out of power for a decade from 1906 to 1915. We have already
indicated our grounds for believing that this condition was not regarded with distaste,
since its members were engaged in important activities of their own and approved of the
conduct of foreign policy (their chief field of interest) by the Liberal Party under Asquith,
Grey, and Haldane. During this period came the Union of South Africa, The Morley-
Minto reforms, the naval race with Germany, the military conversations with France, the
agreement of 1907 with Russia, the British attitude against Germany in the Agadir crisis
(a crisis to whose creation
series of events in which the point of view of the Milner Group was carried out just as if
they were in office. To be sure, in domestic matters such as the budget dispute and the
ensuing House of Lords dispute, and in the question of Home Rule for Ireland, the Milner
Group did not regard the Liberal achievements with complete satisfaction, but in none of
these were the members of the Milner Group diehards (as members of the Cecil Bloc
sometimes were). (1) But with the outbreak of war, the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc
wanted to come to power and wanted it badly, chiefly because control of the government
in wartime would make it possible to direct events toward the postwar settlement which
the Group envisaged. The Group also believed that the war could be used by them to
fasten on Britain the illiberal economic regulation of which they had been dreaming since
Chamberlain resigned in 1903 (at least).
The Group got to power in 1916 by a method which they repeated with the Labour
Party in 1931. By a secret intrigue with a parvenu leader of the government, the Group
offered to make him head of a new government if he would split his own party and
become Prime Minister, supported by the Group and whatever members he could split off
from his own party. The chief difference between 1916 and 1931 is that in the former
year the minority that was being betrayed was the Group's own social class—in fact, the
Liberal Party members of the Cecil Bloc. Another difference is that in 1916 the plot