was secretary to the Foreign Trade Department of the Foreign Office (1916-1917). H. D.
Henderson (who has been a Fellow of All Souls since 1934) was secretary of the Cotton
Control Board (1917-1919).
The Board of Agriculture was dominated by members of the Cecil Bloc and Milner
Group. Lord Selborne was President of the board in 1915-1916, and Prothero (Lord
Ernle) in 1916-1919. Milner and Selborne were chairmen of the two important
committees of the board in 1915 and 1916. These sought to establish as a war measure
(and ultimately as a postwar measure also) government-guaranteed prices for agricultural
products at so high a level that domestic production of adequate supplies would be
insured. This had been advocated by Milner for many years but was not obtained on a
permanent basis until after 1930, although used on a temporary basis in 1917-1919. The
membership of these committees was largely made up of members of the Cecil Bloc. The
second Viscount Goschen (son of Milner's old friend and grandfather-in-law of Milner's
step-grandson) was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board; Lord Astor was chairman of a
dependent committee on milk supplies; Sothern Holland was controller of the Cultivation
Department within the Food Production Department of the board (1918); Mrs. Alfred
Lyttelton was deputy director of the Women's Branch; Lady Alicia Cecil was assistant
director of horticulture in the Food Production Department; and Edward Strutt (brother-
in-law of Balfour), who had been a member of both the Milner and Selborne Committees,
was technical adviser to Prothero during his term as President and was the draftsman of
the Corn Production Act of 1917. He later acted as one of Milner's assistants in the effort
to establish a tariff in 1923. His sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was
written by his nephew (and Balfour's nephew) Lord Rayleigh.
In the Colonial Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918-1921; George Fiddes (of
the Milner Kindergarten) was Permanent Under Secretary in 1916-1921; Steel-Maitland
was Parliamentary Under Secretary in 1915-1917; while Amery was in the same position
in 1919-1921.
In intelligence and public information, we find John Buchan as head of the
Information Department of the War Office, with John Dove and B. H. Sumner (the
present Warden of All Souls) in military intelligence. H. W. C. Davis was general editor
of the Oxford Pamphlets justifying Britain's role in the war, while Algernon Cecil
(nephew of Lord Salisbury) was in the intelligence division of the Admiralty and later in
the historical section of the Foreign Office. J. W. Headlam-Morley was adviser on all
historical matters at Wellington House (the propaganda department) in 1915-1918 and
assistant director of political intelligence in the Department of Information in 1917-1918,
ultimately being shifted to similar work in the Foreign Office in 1918.
In the War Office, Milner was Secretary of State in 1918, while Amery was assistant
to the Secretary from 1917 until Milner took him to the Colonial Office a year or so later.
This enumeration, by no means complete, indicates the all-pervasive influence of this
small clique in the later years of the war. This influence was not devoted exclusively to
winning the war, and, as time went on, it was directed increasingly toward the postwar
settlement. As a result, both groups tended more and more to concentrate in the Foreign
Office. There G. W. Prothero, an old member of the Cecil Bloc, was put in charge of the
preparations for the future peace conference. Depending chiefly on his own branch of the
Foreign Office (the Historical Section), but also using men and materials from the War
Trade Intelligence Department and the Intelligence Section of the Admiralty, he prepared
a large number of reports on questions that might arise at the Peace Conference (1917-
1919). In 1920, 155 volumes of these reports were published under the title Peace
Handbooks. A glance at any complete list of these will show that a very large number of
the "experts" who wrote them were from the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. About the
same time, Phillimore and Zimmern prepared drafts for the organization of the future
League of Nations. Most of the group went en masse to the Peace Conference at Paris as
expert advisers, and anyone familiar with the history of the Peace Conference cannot fail
to recognize names which we have mentioned frequently. At about this time, Lloyd
George began to get out of hand as far as the Milner Group was concerned, and doubtless
also as far as the Cecil Bloc was concerned. Some of this was caused by the weakness of
Balfour, titular head of the latter group, but much more was caused by the fact that the
Group could not control Lloyd George either in his electoral campaign in December 1918
or in his negotiations in the Council of Four from March to June 1919. Lloyd George was
perfectly willing to use
the abilities of the Milner Group in administration, but, when it came to an appeal to the
electorate, as in the "khaki election," he had no respect for the Group's judgment or
advice. Lloyd George realized that the electorate was hysterical with hatred of Germany,
and was willing to appeal to that feeling if he could ride into office again on its impetus.
The Milner Croup, on the other hand, was eager to get rid of the Kaiser, the Prussian
officers' corps, and even the Junker landlords, but, once Germany was defeated, their
feeling of animosity against her (which had waxed strong since before 1896) vanished.
By 1919 they began to think in terms of balance of power and of the need to reconstruct
Germany against the dangers of "bolshevism" on one hand and of "French militarism" on
the other, and they felt that if Germany were made democratic and treated in a friendly
fashion she could be incorporated into the British world system as well as the Cape Boers
had been. The intellectual climate of the Milner Group early in 1919 has been described
by a man who was, at this time, close to the Group, Harold Nicolson, in his volume
Peacemaking, 1919.
This point of view was never thoroughly thought out by the Group. It was apparently
based on the belief that if Germany were treated in a conciliatory fashion she could be
won from her aggressive attitudes and become a civilized member of the British world
system. This may have been possible, but, if so, the plan was very badly executed,
because the aggressive elements in Germany were not eliminated and the conciliatory
elements were not encouraged in a concrete fashion. This failure, however, was partly
caused by the pressure of public opinion, by the refusal of the French to accept this
concept as an adequate goal of foreign policy, and by the failure to analyze the methods
of the policy in a sound and adequate fashion. The first step toward this policy was made
by Milner himself as early as October 1918, when he issued a warning not to denounce
"the whole German nation as monsters of iniquity" or to carry out a policy of punishment
and reprisal against them." The outburst of public indignation at this sentiment was so
great that "the whole band of men who had learned under him in South Africa to
appreciate his patriotism united to testify to him their affectionate respect." This
quotation from one of the band, Basil Williams, refers to a testimonial given by the
Group to their leader in 1918.
Another evidence of this feeling will be found in a volume of Alfred Zimmern's,
published in 1922 under the title Europe in Convalescence and devoted to regretting