barriers and encourage the economic development of the United Kingdom by a system of
government spending, self-regulated capital and labor, social welfare, etc. This program,
which was based on "monopoly capitalism" or even "national socialism" rather than
"financial capitalism," as Brand's was, was embraced by most of the Milner Group after
September 1931, when the ending of the gold standard in Britain proved once and for all
that Brand's financial program of 1919 was a complete disaster and quite unworkable. As
a result, in the years after 1931 the businessmen of the Milner Group embarked on a
policy of government encouragement of self-regulated monopoly capitalism. This was
relatively easy for many members of the Group because of the distrust of economic
individualism which they had inherited from Toynbee and Milner. In April 1932, when P.
Horsfall, manager of Lazard Brothers Bank (a colleague of Brand), asked John Dove to
write a defense of individualism in The Round Table, Dove suggested that he write it
himself, but, in reporting the incident to Brand, he clearly indicated that the Group
regarded individualism as obsolete. (8)
This difference of opinion between Milner and Brand on economic questions is not of
great importance. The important matter is that Brand's opinion prevailed within the
Group from 1919 to 1931, while Milner's has grown in importance from 1931 to the
present. The importance of this can be seen in the fact that the financial and economic
policy followed by the British government from 1919 to 1945 runs exactly parallel to the
policy of the Milner Group. This is no accident but is the result, as we shall see, of the
dominant position held by the Milner Group in the councils of the Conservative-Unionist
party since the First World War.
During the first decade or so of its existence, The Round Table continued to be edited
and written by the inner circle of the Milner Group, chiefly by Lothian, Brand, Hichens,
Grigg, Dawson, Fisher, and Dove. Curtis was too busy with the other activities of the
Group to devote much time to the magazine and had little to do with it until after the war.
By that time a number of others had been added to the Group, chiefly as writers of
occasional articles. Most of these were members or future members of All Souls; they
include Coupland, Zimmern, Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Salter, Sir Maurice Hankey, and
others. The same Group that originally started the project in 1910 still controls it today,
with the normal changes caused by death or old age. The vacancies resulting from these
causes have been filled by new recruits from All Souls. It would appear that Coupland
and Brand are the most influential figures today. The following list gives the editors of
The Round Table from 1910 to the recent past:
Philip Kerr, 1910-1917 (assisted by E. Grigg, 1913-1915)
Reginald Coupland, 1917-1919
Lionel Curtis, 1919-1921
John Dove, 1921-1934
Henry V. Hodson, 1934-1939
Vincent Todd Harlow, (acting editor) 1938
Reginald Coupland, 1939-1941
Geoffrey Dawson, 1941-1944
Of these names, all but two are already familiar. H. V. Hodson, a recent recruit to the
Milner Group, was taken from All Souls. Born in 1906, he was at Balliol for three years
(1925-1928) and on graduation obtained a fellowship to All Souls, which he held for the
regular term (1928-1935). This fellowship opened to him the opportunities which he had
the ability to exploit. On the staff of the Economic Advisory Council from 1930 to 1931
and an important member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, he was assistant
editor of The Round Table for three years (1931-1934) and became editor when Dove
died in 1934. At the same time he wrote for Toynbee the economic sections of the Survey
of International Affairs from 1929 on, publishing these in a modified form as a separate
volume, with the title Slump and Recovery, 1929-1937, in 1938. With the outbreak of the
Second World War in 1939, he left The Round Table editorship and went to the Ministry
of Information (which was controlled completely by the Milner Group) as director of the
Empire Division. After two years in this post he was given the more critical position of
Reforms Commissioner in the Government of India for two years (1941-1942) and then
was made assistant secretary and later head of the non-munitions division of the Ministry
of Production. This position was held until the war ended, three years later. He then
returned to private life as assistant editor of The Sunday Times. In addition to the writings
already mentioned, he published The Economics of a Changing World (1933) and The
Empire in the World (1937), and edited The British Commonwealth and the Future
(1939).
Vincent T. Harlow, born in 1898, was in the Royal Field Artillery in 1917-1919 and
then went to Brasenose, where he took his degree in 1923. He was lecturer in Modern
History at University College, Southampton, in 1923-1927, and then came into the magic
circle of the Milner Group. He was keeper of Rhodes House Library in 1928-1938, Beit
Lecturer in Imperial History in 1930-1935, and has been Rhodes Professor of Imperial
History at the University of London since 1938. He was a member of the Imperial
Committee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and, during the war, was head of
the Empire Information Service at the Ministry of Information. He lives near Oxford,
apparently in order to keep in contact with the Group.
In the decade 1910-1920, the inner circle of the Milner Group was busy with two
other important activities in addition to The Round Table magazine. These were studies
of the problem of imperial federation and of the problem of extending self-government to
India. Both of these were in charge of Lionel Curtis and continued with little interruption
from the war itself. The Round Table, which was in charge of Kerr, never interrupted its
publication, but from 1915 onward it became a secondary issue to winning the war and
making the peace. The problem of imperial federation will be discussed here and in
Chapter 8, the war and the peace in Chapter 7, and the problem of India in Chapter 10.
During the period 1911-1913, as we have said, Curtis was busy in England with the
reports from the Round Table Groups in the Dominions in reply to his printed
memorandum. At the end of 1911 and again in 1913, he printed these reports in two
substantial volumes, without the names of the contributors. These volumes were never
published, but a thousand copies of each were distributed to the various groups. On the
basis of these reports, Curtis drafted a joint report, which was printed and circulated as
each section was completed. It soon became clear that there was no real agreement within
the groups and that imperial federation was not popular in the Dominions. This was a
bitter pill to the Group, especially to Curtis, but he continued to work for several years
more. In 1912, Milner and Kerr went to Canada and made speeches to Round Table
Groups and their associates. The following year Curtis went to Canada to discuss the
status of the inquiry on imperial organization with the various Round Table Groups there
and summed up the results in a speech in Toronto in October 1913.(9) He decided to