the British Isles and Dominions, must be gradually schooled to the management of their
national affairs.... It is not enough that free communities should submit their relations to
the rule of law. Until all those people control that law the principle by which the
commonwealth exists is unfulfilled. The task of preparing for freedom the races which
cannot as yet govern themselves is the supreme duty of those races who can. It is the
spiritual end for which the Commonwealth exists, and material order is nothing except a
means to it.... In India the rule of law is firmly established. Its maintenance is a trust
which rests on the government of the Commonwealth until such time as there are Indians
enough able to discharge it. India may contain leaders qualified not only to make but also
to administer laws, but she will not be ripe for self-government until she contains an
electorate qualified to recognize those leaders and place them in office.... For England the
change is indeed a great one. Can she face it? Can she bear to lose her life, as she knows
it, to find it in a Commonwealth, wide as the world itself, a life greater and nobler than
before? Will she fail at this second and last crisis of her fate, as she failed at the first, like
Athens and Prussia, forsaking freedom for power, thinking the shadow more real than the
light, and esteeming the muckrake more than the crown?”
Four years later, in 1920, Curtis wrote: "The whole effect of the war has been to bring
movements long gathering to a sudden head . . . companionship in arms has fanned . . .
long smouldering resentment against the prescription that Europeans are destined to
dominate the rest of the world. In every part of Asia and Africa it is bursting into
flames.... Personally, I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white
man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome especially to ourselves." (5)
Unfortunately for the world, Curtis, and the Milner Group generally, had one grave
weakness that may prove fatal. Skilled as they were in political and personal relations,
endowed with fortune, education, and family connections, they were all fantastically
ignorant of economics—even those, like Brand or Hichens, who were regarded within the
Group as its experts on this subject. Brand was a financier, while Hichens was a
businessman—in both cases occupations that guarantee nothing in the way of economic
knowledge or understanding.
Curtis was registered as an undergraduate at New College for fourteen years (1891-
1905) because he was too busy to take time to get his degree. This is undoubtedly also the
reason he was admitted to All Souls so belatedly, since an ordinary fellowship requires as
a qualification the possession either of a university prize or of a first-class honours
degree. By the time Curtis took his degree he had fought in the Boer War, been Town
Clerk of Johannesburg, and been assistant secretary for local government in the
Transvaal. In 1906 he resigned his official positions to organize "Closer Union Groups"
agitating for a federation of South Africa. When this work was well started, he became a
member of the Transvaal Legislative Council and wrote the Transvaal draft of a projected
constitution for such a federation. In 1910-1912, and at various times subsequently, he
traveled about the world, organizing Round Table Groups in the Dominions and India. In
1912 he was chosen Beit Lecturer in Colonial History at Oxford, but gave it up in 1913 to
turn his attention for almost six years to the preparatory work for the Government of
India Act of 1919. He was secretary to the Irish Conference of 1921 (arranged by General
Smuts) and was adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office for the next three years. In
1919 he was one of the chief—if not the chief,—founders of the Royal Institute of
International Affairs, and during the 1920s divided his attention between this and the
League of Nations—in neither case, however, in a fashion to attract public attention.
Undoubtedly his influence within the Milner Group declined after 1922, the
preponderance falling into the hands of Lothian, Brand, and Dawson. The failure to
achieve federation within the Empire was undoubtedly a blow to his personal feeling and
possibly to his prestige within the Group. Nonetheless, his influence remained great, and
still is. In the 1920s he moved to Kidlington, near Oxford, and thus was available for the
Group conferences held at All Souls. His chief published works include The Problem of
the Commonwealth (1915), The Commonwealth of Nations (1916), Dyarchy (1920), The
Prevention of War (1924), the Capital Question of China (1932), The Commonwealth of
God (1932-1938), and The Protectorates of South Africa (1935).
John Dove (1872-1934) was sent to Milner in 1903 by Sir William Anson, Warden of
All Souls. He was assistant Town Clerk and later Clerk of Johannesburg (1903-1907) and
then chairman of the Transvaal Land Settlement Board (1907-1909). After a trip to
Australia and India with Lionel Curtis, for the purpose of organizing Round Table
Groups, he returned to London in 1911 and lived with Brand and Kerr in Cumberland
Mansions. He went to South Africa with Earl Grey in 1912 to unveil the Rhodes
Memorial, and served in the First World War with military intelligence in France. In
1918 he became a kind of traveling representative of financial houses, probably as a
result of his relationship with Brand. He began this with an extended trip to India for the
Commonwealth Trust Company in 1918 and in the next fifteen years made almost annual
trips to Europe. Editor of The Round Table from 1921 to his death in 1934, he displayed
an idealistic streak similar to that found in Curtis but without the same driving spirit
behind it. After his death, Brand published a volume of his letters (1938). These are
chiefly descriptive of foreign scenes, the majority written to Brand himself.
Leopold Amery was not a member of the Kindergarten but knew all the members well
and was in South Africa, during their period of service, as chief correspondent of The
Times for the Boer War and the editor of The Times History of the South African War
(which appeared in seven volumes in the decade 1900-1909). Amery, who was a Fellow
of All Souls for fourteen years early in the century and has been one again since 1938, is
one of the inner core of the Milner Group. He started his career as private secretary to
Leonard H. Courtney, Unionist Member of Parliament and Deputy Speaker in Lord
Salisbury's second government. Through this connection, Amery was added to The Times
editorial staff (1899-1909) and would have become editor but for his decision to go into
politics. In this he was not, at first, successful, losing three contests as a Unionist and
tariff reformer in the high tide of Liberal supremacy (1906-1910). When victory came in
1911, it was a good one, for Amery held the same seat (for Birmingham) for thirty-four
years. During that time he held more important government posts than can be mentioned
here. These included the following: assistant secretary of the War Cabinet and Imperial
War Council (1917); secretary to the Secretary of State for War (Milner, 1917-1918);
Parliamentary Under Secretary for Colonies (1919-1921); Parliamentary and Financial