of South Africa, and the unleashing of the horrors of 1939-1945 on the world.
To be sure, in India as elsewhere, the Milner Group ran into bad luck for which
they were not responsible. The chief case of this in India was the Amritsar Massacre
of 1919, which was probably the chief reason for Gandhi's refusal to cooperate in
carrying out the constitutional reforms of that same year. But the Milner Group's
policies were self-inconsistent and were unrealistic. For example, they continually
insisted that the parliamentary system was not fitted to Indian conditions, yet they made
no real effort to find a more adaptive political system, and every time they gave India a
further dose of self-government, it was always another dose of the parliamentary system.
But, clinging to their beliefs, they loaded down this system with special devices which
hampered it from functioning as a parliamentary system should. The irony of this whole
procedure rests in the fact that the minority of agitators in India who wanted self-
government wanted it on the parliamentary pattern and regarded every special device and
every statement from Britain that it was not adapted to Indian conditions as an indication
of the insincerity in the British desire to grant self-government to India.
A second error arises from the Milner Group's lack of enthusiasm for democracy.
Democracy, as a form of government, involves two parts: (1) majority rule and (2)
minority rights. Because of the Group's lack of faith in democracy, they held no brief for
the first of these but devoted all their efforts toward achieving the second. The result was
to make the minority uncompromising, at the same time that they diminished the
majority's faith in their own sincerity. In India the result was to make the Moslem League
almost completely obstructionist and make the Congress Party almost completely
suspicious. The whole policy encouraged extremists and discouraged moderates. This
appears at its worst in the systems of communal representation and communal electorates
established in India by Britain. The Milner Group knew these were bad, but felt that they
were a practical necessity in order to preserve minority rights. In this they were not only
wrong, as proved by history, but were sacrificing principle to expediency in a way that
can never be permitted by a group whose actions claim to be so largely dictated by
principle. To do this weakens the faith of others in the group's principles.
The Group made another error in their constant tendency to accept the outcry of a
small minority of Europeanized agitators as the voice of India. The masses of the Indian
people were probably in favor of British rule, for very practical reasons. The British gave
these masses good government through the Indian Civil Service and other services, but
they made little effort to reach them on any human, intellectual, or ideological level. The
"color line" was drawn—not between British and Indians but between British and the
masses, for the educated upperclass Indians were treated as equals in the majority of
cases. The existence of the color line did not bother the masses of the people, but when it
hit one of the educated minority, he forgot the more numerous group of cases where it
had not been applied to him, became anti-British and began to flood the uneducated
masses with a deluge of anti-British propaganda. This could have been avoided to a great
extent by training the British Civil Servants to practice racial toleration toward all classes,
by increasing the proportion of financial expenditure on elementary education while
reducing that on higher education, by using the increased literacy of the masses of the
people to impress on them the good they derived from British rule and to remove those
grosser superstitions and social customs which justified the color line to so many English.
All of these except the last were in accordance with Milner Group ideas. The members of
the Group objected to the personal intolerance of the British in India, and regretted the
disproportionate share of educational expenditure which went to higher education (see
the speech in Parliament of Ormsby-Gore, 11 December 1934), but they continued to
educate a small minority, most of whom became anti-British agitators, and left the
masses of the people exposed to the agitations of that minority. On principle, the Group
would not interfere with the superstitions and grosser social customs of the masses of the
people, on the grounds that to do so would be to interfere with religious freedom. Yet
Britain had abolished suttee, child marriage, and thuggery, which were also religious in
foundation. If the British could have reduced cow-worship, and especially the number of
cows, to moderate proportions, they would have conferred on India a blessing greater
than the abolition of suttee, child marriage, and thuggery together, would have removed
the chief source of animosity between Hindu and Moslem, and would have raised the
standard of living of the Indian people to a degree that would have more than paid for a
system of elementary education.
If all of these things had been done, the agitation for independence could have been
delayed long enough to build up an electorate capable of working a parliamentary system.
Then the parliamentary system, which educated Indians wanted, could have been
extended to them without the undemocratic devices and animadversions against it which
usually accompanied any effort to introduce it on the part of the British.
Chapter 12—Foreign Policy, 1919-1940
Any effort to write an account of the influence exercised by the Milner Group in
foreign affairs in the period between the two World Wars would require a complete
rewriting of the history of that period. This cannot be done within the limits of a single
chapter, and it will not be attempted. Instead, an effort will be made to point out the chief
ideas of the Milner Group in this field, the chief methods by which they were able to
make those ideas prevail, and a few significant examples of how these methods worked
in practice.
The political power of the Milner Group in the period 1919-1939 grew quite steadily.
It can be measured by the number of ministerial portfolios held by members of the
Group. In the first period, 1919-1924, they generally held about one-fifth of the Cabinet
posts. For example, the Cabinet that resigned in January 1924 had nineteen members;
four were of the Milner Group, only one from the inner circle. These four were Leopold
Amery, Edward Wood, Samuel Hoare, and Lord Robert Cecil. In addition, in the same
period other members of the Group were in the government in one position or another.
Among these were Milner, Austen Chamberlain, H. A. L. Fisher, Lord Ernle, Lord Astor,
Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore. Also, relatives of these, such as
Lord Onslow (brother-in-law of Lord Halifax), Captain Lane-Fox (brother-in-law of Lord
Halifax), and Lord Greenwood (brother-in-law of Amery), were in the government.
In this period the influence of the Milner Group was exercised in two vitally
significant political acts. In the first case, the Milner Group appears to have played an
important role behind the scenes in persuading the King to ask Baldwin rather than
Curzon to be Prime Minister in 1923. Harold Nicolson, in Curzon: The Last Phase
(1934), says that Balfour, Amery, and Walter Long intervened with the King to oppose
Curzon, and "the cumulative effect of these representations was to reverse the previous
decision." Of the three names mentioned by Nicolson, two were of the Cecil Bloc, while