Round Table was not merely, or even chiefly, concerned with saving British skins. It was
concerned with upholding against the despotic state what it began to call ‘the principle of
the commonwealth.’ . . . The root principle of The Round Table remained freedom—‘the
government of men by themselves’ and it demanded that within the Empire this principle
should be persistently pursued and expressed in institutions. For that reason it denounced
the post-war attempt to repress the Irish demand for national self-government by ruthless
violence after a century of union had failed to win Irish consent, as a policy in conflict
with British wealth; and it played its part in achieving the Irish Treaty, and the Dominion
settlement. Within the limits of the practiceable it fought for the Commonwealth ideal in
India. It was closely associated with the device of dyarchy, which seemed for the time
being the most practical method of preventing the perpetuation of an irremovable
executive confronting an irresponsible legislature and of giving Indians practical training
in responsibility for government—the device embodied in the Montagu-Chelmsford
Report and the Government of India Act.... The Round Table, while supporting the legal
formulation of national freedom in the shape of Dominion autonomy, has never lost sight
of its ultimate ideal of an organic and articulate Commonwealth. The purpose of
devolution is not to drive liberty to the point of license but to prepare for the ultimate
basis on which alone freedom can be preserved the reign of law over all.... Federal Union
is the only security for the freedom both of the individual and of the nation. . . . The
principle of anonymity has never been broken and it remains not only as a means of
obtaining material from sources that would otherwise be closed, but also as a guarantee
that both the opinions and the facts presented in the articles are scrutinized by more than
one individual judgment.... Imperceptibly, the form of the review has changed to suit
altered circumstances.... But the fundamentals remain unchanged. Groups in the four
overseas Dominions still assemble their material and hammer out their views,
metaphorically, ‘round the table.’ Some of their members have shared continuously in
this work for a quarter of a century; and in England, too, the group of friends who came
together in South Africa still help to guide the destinies and contribute to the pages of the
review they founded, though the chances of life and death have taken some of their
number, and others have been brought in to contribute new points of view and younger
blood.”
Chapter 5—Milner Group, Rhodes, and Oxford, 1901-1925
It is generally believed, and stated as a fact by many writers, that Milner hoped for
some new political appointment after his return from Africa and was deprived of this by
the election of 1906, which swept the Conservatives from office and brought in the
Liberals. It is perfectly true that Milner was out of political life for ten years, but there is,
so far as I know, no evidence that this was contrary to his own wish. In his farewell
speech of March 1905, delivered long before the Liberal victory at the polls, Milner
stated in reference "to the great idea of Imperial Unity": "I 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." This is exactly what Milner did. Even
after he returned to positions of power in 1915-1921, he worked as quietly as possible
and attracted public attention at an absolute minimum. (1)
Milner had nothing to gain from public office after 1905, until the great crisis of 1915-
1918 made it imperative for all able men to take a hand in active affairs. If he wanted to
speak his own mind, he always had his seat in the House of Lords, and speaking
engagements elsewhere were easy—indeed, too easy—to get. In South Africa his union
program after 1905 was going forward at a rate that exceeded his most optimistic hopes.
And nowhere else did it seem, in 1905, that he could, in actual administration,
accomplish more than he could in quietly building up a combination propaganda and
patronage machine at home. This machine was constructed about Rhodes and his
associates, New College, and All Souls.
Milner was not of any political party himself and regarded party politics with disgust
long before 1905. As his friend Edmund Garrett wrote in 1905: "Rhodes and Milner both
number themselves of that great unformed party which is neither the ins nor the outs,
which touches here the foreign politics of the one, here the home politics of the other; a
party to which Imperialism and Carlyle's Condition of the People Question are one and
the same business of fitly rearing, housing, distributing, coordinating, and training for
war and peace the people of this commonwealth; a party which seems to have no name,
no official leader, no paper even, but which I believe, when it comes by a soul and a
voice, will prove to include a majority of the British in Britain and a still greater majority
of the British overseas." (2) There can be no doubt that these were Milner's sentiments.
He hoped to give that unformed party "a soul and a voice," and he intended to do this
apart from party politics. When he was offered the position of president of the imperial
federalist organization he refused it, but wrote to the secretary, Mr. F. H. Congdon, as
follows:
“Personally I have no political interest worth mentioning, except the maintenance of
the Imperial connection, and I look upon the future with alarm. The party system at home
and in the Colonies seems to me to work for the severance of ties, and that contrary to the
desire of our people on both sides. It is a melancholy instance of the manner in which bad
political arrangements, lauded to the skies from year s end to year's end as the best in the
world, may not only injure the interests, but actually frustrate the desires of the people. I
can see no remedy or protection, under the present circumstances, except a powerful
body of men—and it would have to be very powerful—determined at all times and under
all circumstances to vote and work, regardless of every other circumstance, against the
man or party who played fast and loose with the cause of National Unity. You can be sure
that for my own part I shall always do that....”(3)
Milner, in his distaste for party politics and for the parliamentary system, and in his
emphasis on administration for social welfare, national unity, and imperial federation,
was an early example of what James Burnham has called the "managerial revolution"—
that is, the growth of a group of managers, behind the scenes and beyond the control of
public opinion, who seek efficiently to obtain what they regard as good for the people. To
a considerable extent this point of view became part of the ideology of the Milner Group,
although not of its most articulate members, like Lionel Curtis, who continued to regard
democracy as a good in itself.
Milner's own antipathy to democracy as practiced in the existing party and
parliamentary system is obvious. Writing to his old friend Sir Clinton Dawkins, who had
been, with Milner, a member of the Toynbee group in 1879-1884, he said in 1902: "Two
things constantly strike me. One is the soundness of the British nation as a whole,
contrasted with the rottenness of party politics." About the same time he wrote to another
old Balliol associate, George Parkin: "I am strongly impressed by two things: one that the