the necessity to apply sanctions through a loophole.
In spite of this, the Milner Group were very dissatisfied. They tried simultaneously to
do three things: (1) to persuade public opinion that the League was a wonderful
instrument of international cooperation designed to keep the peace; (2) to criticize the
Covenant for the "traces of a sham world-government" which had been thrown over it;
and (3) to reassure themselves and the ruling groups in England, the Dominions, and the
United States that the League was not "a world-state." All of this took a good deal of neat
footwork, or, more accurately, nimble tongues and neat pen work. More double-talk and
double-writing were emitted by the Milner Group on this subject in the two decades
1919-1939 than was issued by any other group on this subject in the period.
Among themselves the Group did not conceal their disappointment with the Covenant
because it went too far. In the June 1919 issue of The Round Table they said reassuringly:
"The document is not the Constitution of a Super-state, but, as its title explains, a solemn
agreement between Sovereign States which consent to limit their complete freedom of
action on certain points.... The League must continue to depend on the free consent, in the
last resort, of its component States; this assumption is evident in nearly every article of
the Covenant, of which the ultimate and most effective sanction must be the public
opinion of the civilized world. If the nations of the future are in the main selfish,
grasping, and bellicose, no instrument or machinery will restrain them." But in the same
issue we read the complaint: "In the Imperial Conference Sir Wilfrid Laurier was never
tired of saying, 'This is not a Government, but a conference of Governments with
Governments.' It is a pity that there was no one in Paris to keep on saying this. For the
Covenant is still marked by the traces of sham government. "
By the March 1920 issue, the full bitterness of the Group on this last point became
evident. It said: "The League has failed to secure the adhesion of one of its most
important members, The United States, and is very unlikely to secure it.... This situation
presents a very serious problem for the British Empire. We have not only undertaken
great obligations under the League which we must now both in honesty and in self-regard
revise, but we have looked to the League to provide us with the machinery for United
British action in foreign affairs. " (my italics; this is the cat coming out of the bag). The
article continued with criticism of Wilson, and praise of the Republican Senate's refusal
to swallow the League as it stood. It then said:
“The vital weakness of the Treaty and the Covenant became more clear than ever in
the months succeeding the signature at Versailles. A settlement based on ideal principles
and poetic justice can be permanently applied and maintained only by a world
government to which all nations will subordinate their private interests.... It demands, not
only that they should sacrifice their private interests to this world-interest, but also that
they should be prepared to enforce the claims of world-interest even in matters where
their own interests are in no wise engaged. It demands, in fact, that they should
subordinate their national sovereignty to an international code and an international ideal.
The reservations of the American Senate...point the practical difficulties of this ideal with
simple force. All the reservations . . . are affirmations of the sovereign right of the
American people to make their own policy without interference from an International
League.... None of these reservations, it should be noted, contravenes the general aims of
the League; but they are, one and all, directed to ensure that no action is taken in pursuit
of those aims except with the consent and approval of the Congress.... There is nothing
peculiar in this attitude. It is merely, we repeat, the broad reflex of an attitude already
taken up by all the European Allies in questions where their national interests are
affected, and also by the British Dominions in their relations with the British
Government. It gives us a statement in plain English, of the limitations to the ideal of
international action which none of the other Allies will, in practice, dispute. So far,
therefore, from destroying the League of Nations, the American reservations have
rendered it the great service of pointing clearly to the flaws which at present neutralize its
worth.”
Among these flaws, in the opinion of the Milner Croup, was the fact that their plan to
use the League of Nations as a method of tying the Dominions more closely to the United
Kingdom had failed and, instead, the Covenant
“gave the Dominions the grounds, or rather the excuse, to avoid closer union with the
United Kingdom.... It had been found in Paris that in order to preserve its unity the
British delegation must meet frequently as a delegation to discuss its policy before
meeting the representatives of foreign nations in conference. How was this unity of action
to be maintained after the signature of peace without committing the Dominion
Governments to some new constitutional organization within the Commonwealth? And if
some new constitutional organization were to be devised for this purpose, how could it
fail to limit in some way the full national independent status which the Dominion
Governments had just achieved by their recognition as individual members of the League
of Nations? The answer to these questions was found in cooperation within the League,
which was to serve, not only as the link between the British Empire and foreign Powers,
but as the link also between the constituent nations of the British Empire itself. Imbued
with this idea, the Dominion statesmen accepted obligations to foreign Powers under the
Covenant of the League more binding than any obligations which they would undertake
to their kindred nations within the British Empire. In other words, they mortgaged their
freedom of action to a league of foreign States in order to avoid the possibility of
mortgaging it to the British Government. It hardly required the reservations of the
American Senate to demonstrate the illusory character of this arrangement.... The British
Dominions have made no such reservations with regard to the Covenant, and they are
therefore bound by the obligations which have been rejected by the United States.
Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand are, in fact, bound by stronger written
obligations to Poland and Czechoslovakia, than to the British Isles.... It is almost needless
to observe that none of the democracies of the British Empire has grasped the extent of its
obligations to the League of Nations or would hesitate to repudiate them at once, if put to
the test. If England were threatened by invasion, the other British democracies would
mobilize at once for her support; but though they have a written obligation to Poland,
which they have never dreamed of giving to England, they would not in practice mobilize
a single man to defend the integrity of the Corridor to Danzig or any other Polish
territorial interest.... This is a dangerous and equivocal situation.... It is time that our
democracies reviewed and corrected it with the clearness of vision and candour of
statement displayed by the much-abused Senate of the United States.... To what course of
action do these conclusions point? They point in the first place to revision of our
obligations under the League. We are at present pledged to guarantees of territorial
arrangements in Europe which may be challenged at any time by forces too powerful for