Curtis from 1919 on became increasingly remote from Indian affairs. The refusal of the
Indian National Congress under Gandhi's leadership to cooperate in carrying on the
government under the Act of 1919 persuaded the other members of the Group (and
perhaps Curtis himself) that it was not possible to apply responsible government on the
British model to India. This point of view, which had been stated so emphatically by
members of the Cecil Bloc even before 1900, and which formed the chief argument
against the Act of 1919 in the debates in the House of Lords, was accepted by the Milner
Group as their own after 1919. Halifax, Grigg, Amery, Coupland, Fisher, and others
stated this most emphatically from the early 1920s to the middle 1940s. In 1943 Grigg
stated this as a principle in his book The British Commonwealth and quoted with approval
Amery's statement of 30 March 1943 to the House of Commons, rejecting the British
parliamentary system as suitable for India. Amery, at that time Secretary of State for
India, had said: "Like wasps buzzing angrily up and down against a window pane when
an adjoining window may be wide open, we are all held up, frustrated and irritated by the
unrealized and unsuperable barrier of our constitutional prepossessions." Grigg went even
further, indeed, so far that we might suspect that he was deprecating the use of
parliamentary government in general rather than merely in India. He said:
“It is entirely devoid of flexibility and quite incapable of engendering the essential
spirit of compromise in countries where racial and communal divisions present the
principal political difficulty. The idea that freedom to be genuine must be accommodated
to this pattern is deeply rooted in us, and we must not allow our statesmanship to be
imprisoned behind the bars of our own experience. Our insistence in particular on the
principle of a common roll of electors voting as one homogeneous electorate has caused
reaction in South Africa, rebellion or something much too like it in Kenya, and deadlock
in India, because in the different conditions of those countries it must involve the
complete and perpetual dominance of a single race or creed.”
Unfortunately, as Reginald Coupland has pointed out in his book, India, a Re-
statement (1945), all agreed that the British system of government was unsuited to India,
but none made any effort to find an indigenous system that would be suitable. The result
was that the Milner Group and their associates relaxed in their efforts to prepare Indians
to live under a parliamentary system and finally cut India loose without an indigenous
system and only partially prepared to manage a parliamentary system.
This decline in enthusiasm for a parliamentary system in India was well under way by
1921. In the two year-interval from 1919 to 1921, the Group continued as the most
important British factor in Indian affairs. Curtis was editor of The Round Table in this
period and continued to agitate the cause of the Act of 1919. Lord Chelmsford remained a
Viceroy in this period. Meston and Hailey were raised to the Viceroy's Executive
Council. Sir William Duke became Permanent Under Secretary, and Sir Malcolm Seton
became Assistant Under Secretary in the India Office. Sir William Marris was made
Home Secretary of the Government of India and Special Reforms Commissioner in
charge of setting up the new system. L. F. Rushbrook Williams was given special duty at
the Home Department, Government of India, in connection with the reforms. Thus the
Milner Group was well placed to put the new law into effect. The effort was largely
frustrated by Gandhi's boycott of the elections under the new system. By 1921 the Milner
Group had left Indian affairs and shifted its chief interest to other fields. Curtis became
one of the chief factors in Irish affairs in 1921; Lord Chelmsford returned home and was
raised to a Viscounty in the same year; Meston retired in 1919; Marris became Governor
of Assam in 1921; Hailey became Governor of the Punjab in 1924; Duke died in 1924;
and Rushbrook Williams became director of the Central Bureau of Information,
Government of India, in 1920.
This does not indicate that the Milner Group abandoned all interest in India by 1924 or
earlier, but the Group never showed such concentrated interest in the problem of India
again. Indeed, the Group never displayed such concentrated interest in any problem either
earlier or later, with the single exception of the effort to form the Union of South Africa
in 1908-1909.
The decade 1919-1929 was chiefly occupied with efforts to get Gandhi to permit the
Indian National Congress to cooperate in the affairs of government, so that its members
and other Indians could acquire the necessary experience to allow the progressive
realization of self-government. The Congress Party, as we have said, boycotted the
elections of 1920 and cooperated in those of 1924 only for the purpose of wrecking them.
Nonetheless, the system worked, with the support of moderate groups, and the British
extended one right after another in steady succession. Fiscal autonomy was granted to
India in 1921, and that country at once adopted a protective tariff, to the considerable
injury of British textile manufacturing. The superior Civil Services were opened to
Indians in 1924. Indians were admitted to Woolwich and Sandhurst in the same year, and
commissions in the Indian Army were made available to them.
The appointment of Baron Irwin of the Milner Group to be Viceroy in 1926—an
appointment in which, according to A. C. Johnson's biography Viscount Halifax (1941),
"the influence of Geoffrey Dawson and other members of The Times' editorial staff" may
have played a decisive role—was the chief step in the effort to achieve some real
progress under the Act of 1919 before that Act came under the critical examination of
another Royal Commission, scheduled for 1929. The new Viceroy's statement of policy,
made in India, 17 July 1926, was, according to the same source, embraced by The Times
in an editorial "which showed in no uncertain terms that Irwin's policy was appreciated
and underwritten by Printing House Square."
Unfortunately, in the period 1924-1931 the India Office was not in control of either
the Milner Group or Cecil Bloc. For various reasons, of which this would seem to be the
most important, coordination between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy and between
Britain and the Indian nationalists broke down at the most crucial moments. The Milner
Group, chiefly through The Times, participated in this situation in the period 1926-1929
by praising their man, Lord Irwin, and adversely criticizing the Secretary of State, Lord
Birkenhead. Relationships between Birkenhead and the Milner (and Cecil) Group had not
been cordial for a long time, and there are various indications of feuding from at least
1925. We may recall that in April 1925 a secret, or at least unofficial, "committee" of
Milner Group and Cecil Bloc members had nominated Lord Milner for the post of
Chancellor of Oxford University. Lord Birkenhead had objected both to the candidate
and to the procedure. In regard to the candidate, he would have preferred Asquith. In
regard to the procedure, he demanded to know by what authority this "committee" took
upon itself the task of naming a chancellor to a university of which he (Lord Birkenhead)
had been High Steward since 1922. This protest, as usual when Englishmen of this social