Rhodes Scholars. The chairmen of the various delegations included Professor K. H.
Bailey from Australia, E. J. Tarr from Canada, Sir Sardar E. Singh from India, W. P.
Morrell (whom we have already seen as a Beit Lecturer, a Rhodes Scholar, and a co-
editor with the Reverend K. N. Bell of All Souls), Professor S. H. Frankel from South
Africa, and Lord Hailey from the United Kingdom. There were also observers from
Burma and Southern Rhodesia. Of the fifty-three delegates, sixteen were from the United
Kingdom. Among these were Lord Hailey, Lionel Curtis, V. T. Harlow, Sir Frederick
Whyte, A. G. B. Fisher, John Coatman, Miss Kathleen Courtney, Viscount
Hinchingbrooke, A. Creech Jones, Sir Walter Layton, Sir Henry Price, Miss Heather
Harvey, and others. Of the total of fifty-three members, no more than five or six were of
the Milner Croup. The opening speech to the conference was made by Lord Robert Cecil,
and the
Frost, research secretary of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and author of the
imperial sections of
In all the various activities of the Milner Group in respect to Commonwealth affairs, it
is possible to discern a dualistic attitude. This attitude reveals a wholehearted public
acceptance of the existing constitutional and political relationships of Great Britain and
the Dominions, combined with an intense secret yearning for some form of closer union.
The realization that closer union was not politically feasible in a democratic age in which
the majority of persons, especially in the Dominions, rejected any effort to bind the
various parts of the Empire together explains this dualism. The members of the Group, as
The Round Table pointed out in 1919, were not convinced of the effectiveness or
workability of any program of Dominion relations based solely on cooperation without
any institutional basis, but publicly, and in the next breath, the Group wholeheartedly
embraced all the developments that destroyed one by one the legal and institutional links
which bound the Dominions to the mother country. In one special field after another—in
defense, economic cooperation, raw materials conservation, war graves, intellectual
cooperation, health measures, etc., etc.—the Group eagerly welcomed efforts to create
new institutional links between the self-governing portions of the Commonwealth. But all
the time the Group recognized that these innovations were unable to satisfy the yearning
that burned in the Group's collective heart. Only as the Second World War began to enter
its second, and more hopeful, half, did the Group begin once again to raise its voice with
suggestions for some more permanent organization of the constitutional side of
Commonwealth relations. All of these suggestions were offered in a timid and tentative
fashion, more or less publicly labeled as trial balloons and usually prefaced by an
engaging statement that the suggestion was the result of the personal and highly
imperfect ideas of the speaker himself. "Thinking aloud," as Smuts called it, became
epidemic among the members of the Group. These idle thoughts could be, thus, easily
repudiated if they fell on infertile or inhospitable ground, and even the individual whence
these suggestions emanated could hardly be held responsible for "thinking aloud." All of
these suggestions followed a similar pattern: (1) a reflection on the great crisis which the
Commonwealth survived in 1940-1942; (2) an indication that this crisis required some
reorganization of the Commonwealth in order to avoid its repetition; (3) a passage of high
praise for the existing structure of the Commonwealth and an emphatic statement that the
independence and autonomy of its various members is close to the speaker's heart and
that nothing he suggests must be taken as implying any desire to infringe in the slightest
degree on that independence; and (4) the suggestion itself emerges. The logical
incompatibility of the four sections of the pattern is never mentioned and if pointed out
by some critic would undoubtedly be excused on the grounds that the English are
practical rather than logical—an excuse behind which many English, even outside the
Milner Group, frequently find refuge.
We shall give three examples of the Milner Group's suggestions for Commonwealth
reform in the second half of the recent war. They emanated from General Smuts, Lord
Halifax, and Sir Edward Grigg. All of them were convinced that the British
Commonwealth would be drastically weaker in the postwar world and would require
internal reorganization in order to take its place as a balancing force between the two
great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Smuts, in an article in the
American weekly magazine
United Kingdom branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in London on 25