they wrote to Beer, and thus began a close and sympathetic relationship. He wrote the
reports on the United States in The Round Table for many years, and his influence is
clearly evident in Curtis's The Commonwealth of Nations. He gave a hint of the existence
of the Milner Group in an article which he wrote for the Political Science Quarterly of
June 1915 on Milner. He said: "He stands forth as the intellectual leader of the most
progressive school of imperial thought throughout the Empire." Beer was one of the chief
supporters of American intervention in the war against Germany in the period 1914-1917;
he was the chief expert on colonial questions on Colonel House's "Inquiry," which was
studying plans for the peace settlements; and he was the American expert on colonial
questions at the Peace Conference in Paris. The Milner Group was able to have him
named head of the Mandate Department of the League of Nations as soon as it was
established. He was one of the originators of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
in London and its American branch, The Council on Foreign Relations. With Lord
Eustace Percy, he drew up the plan for the History of the Peace Conference which was
carried out by Harold Temperley.
Curtis's suggestion for a mandates system was published in The Round Table after
discussions with Kerr and other members of the inner circle. It was read by Smuts before
it was printed and was used by the latter as the basis for his memorandum published in
December 1918 with the title The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion. This
embodied a constitution for the League of Nations in twenty-one articles. The first nine
of these dealt with the question of mandates. The mandates article of the final Covenant
of the League (Article 22) was drafted by Smuts and Kerr (according to Temperley) and
was introduced by Smuts to the League Commission of the Peace Conference. The
mandates themselves were granted under conditions drawn up by Lord Milner. Since it
was felt that this should be done on an international basis, the Milner drafts were not
accepted at once but were submitted to an international committee of five members
meeting in London. On this committee Milner was chairman and sole British member and
succeeded in having his drafts accepted.(5)
The execution of the terms of the mandates were under the supervision of a Permanent
Mandates Commission of nine members (later ten). The British member of this
commission was always of the Milner Group, as can be seen from the following list:
W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, February 1921-July 1923
Lord Lugard, July 1923-July 1936
Lord Hailey, September 1936-March 1939
Lord Hankey, May 1939-September 1939
Lord Hailey, September 1939
The origins and the supervision power of the mandates system were thus largely a
result of the activities of the Milner Group. This applied to Palestine as well as the other
mandates. Palestine, however, had a peculiar position among mandates because of the
Balfour Declaration of 1917, which states that Britain would regard with favor the
establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. This declaration, which is
always known as the Balfour Declaration, should rather be called "the Milner
Declaration," since Milner was the actual draftsman and was, apparently, its chief
supporter in the War Cabinet. This fact was not made public until 21 July 1937. At that
time Ormsby-Gore, speaking for the government in Commons, said, "The draft as
originally put up by Lord Balfour was not the final draft approved by the War Cabinet.
The particular draft assented to by the War Cabinet and afterwards by the Allied
Governments and by the United States . . . and finally embodied in the Mandate, happens
to have been drafted by Lord Milner. The actual final draft had to be issued in the name
of the Foreign Secretary, but the actual draftsman was Lord Milner." Milner had referred
to this fact in a typically indirect and modest fashion in the House of Lords on 27 June
1923, when he said, "I was a party to the Balfour Declaration." In the War Cabinet, at the
time, he received strong support from General Smuts.
Once the mandate was set up, also in terms drafted by Milner, the Milner Group took
little actual part in the administration of Palestine. None of the various high
commissioners was a member of the Group, and none of the various commissions
concerned with this problem possessed a member from the Group until the Peel
Commission of 1936. Reginald Coupland was one of the six members of the Peel
Commission and, according to unofficial information, was the chief author of its report.
In spite of this lack of direct contact with the subject, the Milner Group exercised a
certain amount of influence in regard to Palestine because of its general power in the
councils of the Conservative Party and because Palestine was administered through the
Colonial Office, where the Milner Group's influence was considerable.
The general attitude of the Milner Group was neither pro-Arab nor pro-Zionist,
although tending, if at all, toward the latter rather than the former. The Group were never
anti-Semitic, and not a shred of evidence in this direction has been found. In fact, they
were very sympathetic to the Jews and to their legitimate aspirations to overcome their
fate, but this feeling, it must be confessed, was rather general and remote, and they did
not, in their personal lives, have much real contact with Jews or any real appreciation of
the finer qualities of those people. Their feeling against anti-Semitism was, on the whole,
remote and academic. On the other hand, as with most upper-class English, their feeling
for the Arabs was somewhat more personal. Many members of the Group had been in
Arab countries, found their personal relationships with the Arabs enjoyable, and were
attracted to them. However, this attraction of the Arabs never inclined the Milner Group
toward that pro-Arab romanticism that was to be found in people like W. S. Blunt or T.
E. Lawrence. The reluctance of the Milner Group to push the Zionist cause in Palestine
was based on more academic considerations, chiefly two in number: (1) the feeling that it
would not be fair to allow the bustling minority of Zionists to come into Palestine and
drive the Arabs either out or into an inferior economic and social position; and (2) the
feeling that to do this would have the effect of alienating the Arabs from Western, and
especially British, culture, and that this would be especially likely to occur if the Jews
obtained control of the Mediterranean coast from Egypt to Syria. Strangely enough, there
is little evidence that the Milner Group was activated by strategic or economic
considerations at all. Thus the widely disseminated charges that Britain failed to support
Zionism in Palestine because of anti-Semitism or strategic and economic considerations
is not supported by any evidence found within the Milner Group. This may be true of
other sections of British public opinion, and certainly is true of the British Labour Party,
where the existence of anti-Semitism as an influence seems clearly established.
In Palestine, as in India and probably in Ireland, the policy of the Milner Group seems
to have been motivated by good intentions which alienated the contending parties,
encouraged extremism, and weakened British influence with both. In the long run, this
policy was pro-Arab, just as in India it was pro-Moslem, and in both cases it served to