heart of the nation is sound,—and secondly that our constitution and methods are
antiquated and bad, and the real sound feeling of the nation does not get a chance of
making itself effective." Two years later he wrote to a friend of Rhodes, Sir Lewis
Michelclass="underline" "Representative government has its merits, no doubt, but the influence of
representative assemblies, organized on the party system, upon administration—
'government' in the true sense of the word—is almost uniformly bad."(4)
With sentiments such as these, Milner laid down the duties of public office with relief
and devoted himself, not to private affairs, but to the secret public matters associated with
his "Association of Helpers." To support himself during this period, Milner acted as
confidential adviser to certain international financiers in London's financial district. His
entree to this lucrative occupation may have been obtained through Lord Esher, who had
just retired from a similar well-remunerated collaboration with Sir Ernest Cassel.
Milner's most important work in this period was concerned with the administration of
the Rhodes Trust and the contacts with Oxford University which arose out of this and
from his own position as a Fellow of New College.
The Rhodes Trust was already in operation when Milner returned from Africa in 1905,
with the actual management of the scholarships in the hands of George Parkin, who had
been brought from his position as Principal of Upper Canada College by Milner. He held
the post for eighteen years (1902-1920). The year following his appointment, an Oxford
secretary to the trustees was appointed to handle the local work during Parkin's extended
absences. This appointment went to Francis Wylie (Sir Francis since 1929), Fellow and
tutor of Brasenose, who was named by the influence of Lord Rosebery, whose sons he
had tutored.(5) The real control of the trust has rested with the Milner Group from 1902
to the present. Milner was the only really active trustee and he controlled the bureaucracy
which handled the trust. As secretary to the trustees before 1929, we find, for example,
George Parkin (1902-1920), Geoffrey Dawson (1921-1922), Edward Grigg (1922-1925),
and Lord Lothian (1925-1940)—all of them clearly Milner's nominees. On the Board of
Trustees itself, in the same period, we find Lord Rosebery, Lord Milner, Lord Grey, Dr.
Jameson, Alfred Beit, Lewis Michell, B. F. Hawksley, Otto Beit, Rudyard Kipling,
Leopold Amery, Stanley Baldwin, Geoffrey Dawson, H. A. L. Fisher, Sothern Holland,
and Sir Edward Peacock. Peacock had been teacher of English and housemaster at Upper
Canada College during the seven years in which Parkin was principal of that institution
(1895-1902) and became an international financier as soon as Parkin became secretary of
the Rhodes Trust. Apparently he did not represent the Rhodes Trust but rather the
interests of that powerful and enigmatic figure Edward Rogers Wood of Toronto. Wood
and Peacock were very close to the Canadian branch of the Milner Group, that is to say,
to A. J. Glazebrook, Parkin, and the Massey family, but it is not clear that either
represented the interests of the Milner Group. Peacock was associated at first with the
Dominion Securities Corporation of London (1902-1915) and later with Baring Brothers
as a specialist in utility enterprises in Mexico, Spain, and Brazil (1915-1924). He was
made Receiver-General of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1929 and was knighted in 1934. He
was a director of the Bank of England from 1921-1946, managing director of Baring
Brothers from 1926, a director of Vickers-Armstrong from 1929, and in addition a
director of many world-famous corporations, such as the Canadian Pacific Railway, the
Hudson Bay Company, and the Sun Life Assurance Society. He was an expert at the
Genoa Conference in 1922 and acted as the British Treasury's representative in
Washington during the Second World War.
If we look at the list of Rhodes Trustees, we see that the Milner Group always had
complete control. Omitting the five original trustees, we see that five of the new additions
were from the Milner Group, three were from the Rhodes clique, and three represented
the outside world. In the 1930s the Board was stabilized for a long period as Amery,
Baldwin, Dawson, Fisher, Holland, and Peacock, with Lothian as secretary. Six of these
seven were of the Milner Group, four from the inner core.
A somewhat similar situation existed in respect to the Beit Railway Fund. Although of
German birth, Alfred Beit became a British subject and embraced completely the ideas on
the future role of the British Empire shared by Rhodes and Milner. An intimate friend of
these and of Lord Rosebery, he was especially concerned with the necessity to link the
British possessions in Africa together by improved transportation (including the Cape to
Cairo Railway). Accordingly, he left £1,200,000 as the Beit Railway Trust, to be used for
transportation and other improvements in Africa. The year before his death (1906), he
was persuaded by the Milner Group to establish a Beit Professorship and a Beit
Lecturership in Colonial History at Oxford. The money provided yielded an income far in
excess of the needs of these two chairs, and the surplus has been used for other
"imperialist" purposes. In addition, Beit gave money to the Bodleian Library at Oxford
for books on colonial history. In 1929, when Rhodes House was opened, these and other
books on the subject were moved from the Bodleian to Rhodes House, and the Beit
Professor was given an office and lecture hall in Rhodes House. There have been only
two incumbents of the Beit Professorship since 1905: Hugh Edward Egerton in 1905-
1920, and Reginald (Sir Reginald since 1944) Coupland since 1920. Egerton, a member
of the Cecil Bloc and the Round Table Group, was a contemporary of Milner's at Oxford
whose father was a member of the House of Commons and Under Secretary for Foreign
Affairs. He was originally private secretary to his cousin Edward Stanhope, Colonial
Secretary and Secretary of War in Lord Salisbury's first government. In 1886, Egerton
became a member of the managing committee of the newly created Emigrants
Information Office. He held this job for twenty years, during which time he came into the
sphere of the Milner Group, partly because of the efforts of South Africa, and especially
the British South Africa Company, to encourage emigration to their territories, but also
because of his Short History of British Colonial Policy, published in 1897. On the basis
of this contact and this book, he was given the new Beit Chair in 1905 and with it a
fellowship at All Souls. In his professional work he constantly supported the aims of the
Milner Group, including the publication of Federations and Unions within the British
Empire (1911) and British Colonial Policy in the Twentieth Century (1922). His book
Canadian Constitutional Development, along with Sir Charles Lucas's edition of Lord
Durham's reports, was the chief source of information for the process by which Canada
was federated used by the Milner Group. He wrote the biography of Joseph Chamberlain
in the Dictionary of National Biography, while his own biography in the same collection
was written by Reginald Coupland. He remained a Fellow of All Souls and a member of
the Milner Group until his death in 1927, although he yielded his academic post to
Reginald Coupland in 1920. Coupland, who was a member of the Milner Group from his