statement. When J. A. Farrer's book England under Edward VII was published in 1922
and maintained that the British press, especially The Times, was responsible for bad
Anglo-German feeling before 1909, The Times Literary Supplement gave it to J. W.
Headlam-Morley to review. And when Baron von Eckardstein, who was in the German
Embassy in London at the time of the Boer War, published his memoirs in 1920, the
same journal gave the book to Chirol to review, even though Chirol was an interested
party and was dealt with in a critical fashion in several passages in the book itself. Both
of these reviews were anonymous.
There is no effort here to contend that the Milner Group ever falsified or even
concealed evidence (although this charge could be made against The Times). Rather it
propagated its point of view by interpretation and selection of evidence. In this fashion it
directed policy in ways that were sometimes disastrous. The Group as a whole was made
up of intelligent men who believed sincerely, and usually intensely, in what they
advocated, and who knew that their writings were intended for a small minority as
intelligent as themselves. In such conditions there could be no value in distorting or
concealing evidence. To do so would discredit the instruments they controlled. By giving
the facts as they stood, and as completely as could be done in consistency with the
interpretation desired, a picture could be construed that would remain convincing for a
long time.
This is what was done by The Times. Even today, the official historian of The Times is
unable to see that the policy of that paper was anti-German from 1895 to 1914 and as
such contributed to the worsening of Anglo-German relations and thus to the First World
War. This charge has been made by German and American students, some of them of the
greatest diligence and integrity, such as Professors Sidney B. Fay, William L. Langer,
Oron J. Hale, and others. The recent History of The Times devotes considerable space and
obviously spent long hours of research in refuting these charges, and fails to see that it
has not succeeded. With the usual honesty and industry of the Milner Group, the historian
gives the evidence that will convict him, without seeing that his interpretation will not
hold water. He confesses that the various correspondents of The Times in Berlin played
up all anti-English actions and statements and played down all pro-English ones; that
they quoted obscure and locally discredited papers in order to do this; that all The Times
foreign correspondents in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere were anti-German, and
that these were the ones who were kept on the staff and promoted to better positions; that
the one member of the staff who was recognized as being fair to Germany (and who was
unquestionably the most able man in the whole Times organization), Donald Mackenzie
Wallace, was removed as head of the Foreign Department and shunted off to be editor of
the supplementary volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica (which was controlled by The
Times); and that The Times frequently printed untrue or distorted information on
Germany. All of this is admitted and excused as the work of honest, if hasty, journalists,
and the crowning proof that The Times was not guilty as charged is implied to be the fact
that the Germans did ultimately get into a war with Britain, thus proving at one stroke
that they were a bad lot and that the attitude of The Times staff toward them was justified
by the event.
It did not occur to the historian of The Times that there exists another explanation of
Anglo-German relations, namely that in 1895 there were two Germanies—the one
admiring Britain and the other hating Britain—and that Britain, by her cold-blooded and
calculated assault on the Boers in 1895 and 1899, gave the second (and worse) Germany
the opportunity to criticize and attack Britain and gave it the arguments with which to
justify a German effort to build up naval defenses. The Times, by quoting these attacks
and actions representative of the real attitude and actual intentions of all Germans, misled
the British people and abandoned the good Germans to a hopeless minority position,
where to be progressive, peaceful, or Anglophile was to be a traitor to Germany itself.
Chirol's alienation of Baron von Eckardstein (one of the "good" Germans, married to an
English lady), in a conversation in February 1900,(14) shows exactly how The Times
attitude was contributing to consolidate and alienate the Germans by the mere fact of
insisting that they were consolidated and alienated—and doing this to a man who loved
England and hated the reactionary elements in Germany more than Chirol ever did.
Chapter 7—TheRoundTable
The second important propaganda effort of the Milner Group in the period after 1909
was The Round Table. This was part of an effort by the circle of the Milner Group to
accomplish for the whole Empire what they had just done for South Africa. The leaders
were Philip Kerr in London, as secretary of the London group, and Lionel Curtis
throughout the world, as organizing secretary for the whole movement, but most of the
members of the Kindergarten cooperated in the project. The plan of procedure was the
same as that which had worked so successfully in South Africa—that is, to form local
groups of influential men to agitate for imperial federation and to keep in touch with
these groups by correspondence and by the circulation of a periodical. As in South
Africa, the original cost of the periodical was paid by Abe Bailey. This journal, issued
quarterly, was called The Round Table, and the same name was applied to the local
groups.
Of these local groups, the most important by far was the one in London. In this, Kerr
and Brand were the chief figures. The other local groups, also called Round Tables, were
set up by Lionel Curtis and others in South Africa, in Canada, in New Zealand, in
Australia, and, in a rather rudimentary fashion and somewhat later, in India.
The reasons for doing this were described by Curtis himself in 1917 in A Letter to the
People of India, as follows: "We feared that South Africa might abstain from a future war
with Germany, on the grounds that they had not participated in the decision to make
war.... Confronted by this dilemma at the very moment of attaining Dominion self-
government, we thought it would be wise to ask people in the oldest and most
experienced of all Dominions what they thought of the matter. So in 1909, Mr. Kerr and I
went to Canada and persuaded Mr. Marris, who was then on leave, to accompany us.”(1)
On this trip the three young men covered a good portion of the Dominion. One day,
during a walk through the forests on the Pacific slopes of the Canadian Rockies, Marris
convinced Curtis that "self-government, . . . however far distant, was the only intelligible
goal of British policy in India.... The existence of political unrest in India, far from being
a reason for pessimism, was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest
failings, had not shirked their primary duty of extending Western education to India and