furthered the plans of the Milner Group for the great subcontinent (1926-1931), before
returning to more brilliant achievements as president of the Board of Education (1932-
1935), Secretary of State for War (1935), Lord Privy Seal (1935-1937), Lord President of
the Council (1937-1938), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1938-1940), and, finally,
Ambassador to Washington (as successor to Lord Lothian, 1941-1946). In Washington,
as we shall see, he filled the embassy with members of All Souls College.
There can be little doubt that Lora Halifax owed much of his rise in public affairs to
his membership in the Milner Group. His authorized biographer, Alan Campbell Johnson,
writes in connection with one appointment of Halifax's: "It is widely believed that the
influence of Geoffrey Dawson and other members of The Times editorial staff discovered
him as an ideal Viceroy and whispered his name at the proper time both to the proper
authorities in George V's entourage and at 10 Downing Street." In connection with his
appointment as Foreign Secretary, Johnson says:
“Lothian, Geoffrey Dawson, and Brand, who used to congregate at Cliveden House as
the Astors' guests and earned the title of a "set," to which, in spite of imaginative left-
wing propaganda, they never aspired, urged Chamberlain at the decisive moment to have
the courage of his convictions and place Halifax, even though he was a Peer, in the office
to which his experience and record so richly entitled him. They argued forcibly that to
have a Foreign Secretary safely removed from the heat of the House of Commons battle
was just what was required to meet the delicate international situation.”
Another member of this South African group who was not technically a member of
the Kindergarten (because not a member of the civil service) was Basil Kellett Long. He
went from Brasenose to Cape Town to study law in 1902 and was called to the bar three
years later. In 1908 he was elected to the Cape Parliament, and a year later succeeded
Kerr as editor of the Kindergarten's propagandist journal, The State (1909-1912). He was
a member of the first Parliament of a united South Africa for three years (1910-1913) and
then succeeded Amery as head of the Dominions Department of The Times. In 1921 he
left this post and the position of foreign editor (held jointly with it in 1920-1921) to return
to South Africa as editor of the Cape Times (1921-1935). He was one of the most
important figures in the South African Institute of International Affairs after its belated
foundation. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he was put in charge of liaison work
between the South African branch and the parent institute in London.
The work of the Kindergarten in South Africa is not so well known as might be
expected. Indeed, until very recently the role played by this group, because of its own
deliberate policy of secrecy, has been largely concealed. The only good narration of their
work is to be found in Worsfold's The Reconstruction of the New Colonies under Lord
Milner, but Worsfold, writing so early, could not foresee the continued existence of the
Kindergarten as a greater and more influential group. Lionel Curtis's own account of
what the Group did, in his Letter to the People of India (1917), is very brief and virtually
unknown in the United States or even in England. The more recent standard accounts,
such as that in Volume VIII of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (1936), give
even less than Worsfold. This will not appear surprising when we point out that the
chapter in this tome dealing with "The Formation of the Union, 1901-1910" is written by
Hugh A. Wyndham, a member of the Kindergarten. It is one of the marvels of modern
British scholarship how the Milner Group has been able to keep control of the writing of
history concerned with those fields in which it has been most active.
Only in very recent years has the role played by the Kindergarten as part of a larger
group been appreciated, and now only by a very few writers, such as the biographer of
Lord Halifax, already mentioned, and M. S. Green. The latter, a high school teacher in
Pretoria, South Africa, in his brief work on The Making of the Union of South Africa
(1946) gives an account of the Kindergarten which clearly shows his realization that this
was only the early stages of a greater group that exercised its influence through The
Round Table, The Times, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the College of
All Souls. The work of union in South Africa was only part of the much greater task of
imperial union. This was always the ultimate goal of Cecil Rhodes, of Milner, and of the
Kindergarten. Milner wrote in his diary on 25 January 1904: "My work has been
constantly directed to a great and distant end—the establishment in South Africa of a
great and civilized and progressive community, one from Cape Town to the Zambesi—
independent in the management of its own affairs, but still remaining, from its own firm
desire, a member of the great community of free nations gathered together under the
British flag. That has been the object of all my efforts. It is my object still." (8) In his
great farewell speech of March 1905, Milner called upon his hearers, and especially the
Kindergarten, to remain loyal to this ultimate goal. He said:
“What I pray for hardest is, that those with whom I have worked in a great struggle
and who may attach some weight to my words should remain faithful, faithful above all
in the period of reaction, to the great idea of Imperial Unity. Shall we ever live to see its
fulfillment? Whether we do or not, whether we succeed or fail, l shall always be steadfast
in that faith, though I should prefer to work quietly and in the background, in the
formation of opinion rather than in the exercise of power.... When we who call ourselves
Imperialists talk of the British Empire, we think of a group of states, all independent in
their local concerns, but all united for the defense of their own common interests and the
development of a common civilization; united, not in an alliance—for alliances can be
made and unmade, and are never more than nominally lasting—but in a permanent
organic union. Of such a union the dominions as they exist today, are, we fully admit,
only the raw material. Our ideal is still distant but we deny that it is either visionary or
unattainable.... The road is long, the obstacles are many, the goal may not be reached in
my lifetime—perhaps not in that of any man in this room. You cannot hasten the slow
growth of a great idea like that by any forcing process. But what you can do is to keep it
steadily in view, to lose no opportunity to work for it, to resist like grim death any policy
which leads away from it. I know that the service of that idea requires the rarest
combination of qualities, a combination of ceaseless effort with infinite patience. But
then think on the other hand of the greatness of the reward; the immense privilege of
being allowed to contribute in any way to the fulfillment of one of the noblest
conceptions which has ever dawned on the political imagination of mankind.”
For the first couple of years in South Africa the Kindergarten worked to build up the
administrative, judicial, educational, and economic systems of South Africa. By 1905
they were already working for the Union. The first steps were the Inter-colonial Council,