Anglo-American Establishment полностью

closer union. It continued to toy with Grigg's idea of regional blocs within the

Commonwealth, but here it found an almost insoluble problem. If a regional bloc were to

be created in Africa, the natives of the African colonial areas would be exposed to the un-

tender mercies of the South African Boers, and it would be necessary to repudiate the

promises of native welfare which the Group had supported in the Kenya White Paper of

1923, its resistance to Boer influence in the three native protectorates in South Africa, the

implications in favor of native welfare in The African Survey of 1938, and the frequent

pronouncements of The Round Table on the paramount importance of protecting native

rights. Such a repudiation was highly unlikely, and indeed was specifically rejected by

Grigg himself in his book.(4)

The Milner Group itself had been one of the chief, if not the chief, forces in Britain

intensifying the decentralizing influences in the self-governing portions of the Empire.

This influence was most significant in regard to India, Palestine, Ireland, and Egypt, each

of which was separated from Great Britain by a process in which the Milner Group was a

principal agent. The first of these is so significant that it will be discussed in a separate

chapter, but a few words should be said about the other three here.

The Milner Group had relatively little to do with the affairs of Palestine except in the

early period (1915-1919), in the later period (the Peel Report of 1937), and in the fact that

the British influence on the Permanent Mandates Commission was always exercised

through a member of the Group.

The idea of establishing a mandate system for the territories taken from enemy powers

as a result of the war undoubtedly arose from the Milner Group's inner circle. It was first

suggested by George Louis Beer in a report submitted to the United States Government

on 1 January 1918, and by Lionel Curtis in an article called "Windows of Freedom" in

The Round Table for December 1918. Beer was a member of the Round Table Group

from about 1912 and was, in fact, the first member who was not a British subject. That

Beer was a member of the Group was revealed in the obituary published in The Round

Table for September 1920. The Group's attention was first attracted to Beer by a series of Anglophile studies on the British Empire in the eighteenth century which he published in

the period after 1893. A Germanophobe as well as an Anglophile, he intended by writing,

if we are to believe The Round Table, "to counteract the falsehoods about British

Colonial policy to be found in the manuals used in American primary schools." When the

Round Table Group, about 1911, began to study the causes of the American Revolution,

they wrote to Beer, and thus began a close and sympathetic relationship. He wrote the

reports on the United States in The Round Table for many years, and his influence is

clearly evident in Curtis's The Commonwealth of Nations. He gave a hint of the existence

of the Milner Group in an article which he wrote for the Political Science Quarterly of

June 1915 on Milner. He said: "He stands forth as the intellectual leader of the most

progressive school of imperial thought throughout the Empire." Beer was one of the chief

supporters of American intervention in the war against Germany in the period 1914-1917;

he was the chief expert on colonial questions on Colonel House's "Inquiry," which was

studying plans for the peace settlements; and he was the American expert on colonial

questions at the Peace Conference in Paris. The Milner Group was able to have him

named head of the Mandate Department of the League of Nations as soon as it was

established. He was one of the originators of the Royal Institute of International Affairs

in London and its American branch, The Council on Foreign Relations. With Lord

Eustace Percy, he drew up the plan for the History of the Peace Conference which was

carried out by Harold Temperley.

Curtis's suggestion for a mandates system was published in The Round Table after

discussions with Kerr and other members of the inner circle. It was read by Smuts before

it was printed and was used by the latter as the basis for his memorandum published in

December 1918 with the title The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion. This

embodied a constitution for the League of Nations in twenty-one articles. The first nine

of these dealt with the question of mandates. The mandates article of the final Covenant

of the League (Article 22) was drafted by Smuts and Kerr (according to Temperley) and

was introduced by Smuts to the League Commission of the Peace Conference. The

mandates themselves were granted under conditions drawn up by Lord Milner. Since it

was felt that this should be done on an international basis, the Milner drafts were not