Extracted from The Anglo-American Establishment, from Rhodes to Cliveden, (1966) The Cecil familys extraordinary secret society, Greek pagan roots of Milners project to privatise the British empire & foreign policy. by Carroll Quigley. THE SECOND important propaganda effort of the Milner Group in the period after 1909 was The Round Table. This was part of an effort by the circle of the Milner Group to accomplish for the whole Empire what they had just done for South Africa. The leaders were Philip Kerr in London, as secretary of the London group, and Lionel Curtis throughout the world, as organizing secretary for the whole movement, but most of the members of the Kindergarten cooperated in the project. The plan of procedure was the same as that which had worked so successfully in South Africa - that is, to form local groups of influential men to agitate for imperial federation and to keep in touch with these groups by correspondence and by the circulation of a periodical. As in South Africa, the original cost of the periodical was paid by Abe Bailey. This journal, issued quarterly, was called The Round Table, and the same name was applied to the local groups. Of these local groups, the most important by far was the one in London. In this, Kerr and Brand were the chief figures. The other local groups, also called Round Tables, were set up by Lionel Curtis and others in South Africa, in Canada, in New Zealand, in Australia, and, in a rather rudimentary fashion and somewhat later, in India. The reasons for doing this were described by Curtis himself in 1917 in A Letter to the People of India, as follows: We feared that South Africa might abstain from a future war with Germany, on the grounds that they had not participated in the decision to make war. . . . Confronted by this dilemma at every moment of attaining Dominion self-government, we thought it would be wise to ask people in the oldest and most experienced of all Dominions what they thought of the matter. So in 1909, Mr. Kerr and I went to Canada and persuaded Mr. Marris, who was then on leave, to accompany us. [1] On this trip the three young men covered a good portion of the Dominion. One day, during a walk through the forests on the Pacific slopes of the Canadian Rockies, Marris convinced Curtis that self government, . . . however far distant, was the only intelligible goal of British policy in India. . . . The existence of political unrest in India, far from being a reason for pessimism, was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest failings, had not shirked their primary duty of extending Western education to India and so preparing Indians to govern themselves. I have since looked back on this walk, wrote Curtis, as one of the milestones of my own education. So far I had thought of self-government as a Western institution, which was and would always remain peculiar to the peoples of Europe. . . . It was from that moment that I first began to think of the Government of each by each and of all by all not merely as a principle of Western life, but rather of all human life, as the goal to which all human societies must tend. It was from that moment that I began to think of the British Commonwealth as the greatest instrument ever devised for enabling that principle to be realized, not merely for the children of Europe, but for all races and kindreds and peoples and tongues. And it is for that reason that I have ceased to speak of the British Empire and called the book in which I published my views The Commonwealth of Nations. Because of Curtiss position and future influence, this walk in Canada was important not only in his personal life but also in the future history of the British Empire. It needs only to be pointed out that India received complete self-government in 1947 and the British Commonwealth changed its name officially to Commonwealth of Nations in 1948. There can be no doubt that both of these events resulted in no small degree from the influence of Lionel Curtis and the Milner Group, in which he was a major figure. Curtis and his friends stayed in Canada for four months. Then Curtis returned to South Africa for the closing session of the Transvaal Legislative Council, of which he was a member. He there drafted a memorandum on the whole question of imperial relations, and, on the day that the Union of South Africa came into existence, he sailed to New Zealand to set up study groups to examine the question. These groups became the Round Table Groups of New Zealand.[2] The memorandum was printed with blank sheets for written comments opposite the text. Each student was to note his criticisms on these blank pages. Then they were to meet in their study groups to discuss these comments, in the hope of being able to draw up joint reports, or at least majority and minority reports, on their conclusions. These reports were to be sent to Curtis, who was to compile a comprehensive report on the whole imperial problem. This comprehensive report would then be submitted to the groups in the same fashion and the resulting comments used as a basis for a final report. Five study groups of this type were set up in New Zealand, and then five more in Australia. [3] The decision was made to do the same thing in Canada and in England, and this was done by Curtis, Kerr, and apparently Dove during 1910. On the trip to Canada, the missionaries carried with them a letter from Milner to his old friend Arthur J. Glazebrook, with whom he had remained in close contact throughout the years since Glazebrook went to Canada for an English bank in 1893. The Round Table in 1941, writing of Glazebrook, said, His great political hero was his friend Lord Milner, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence. As a result of this letter from Milner, Glazebrook undertook the task of founding Round Table Groups in Canada and did this so well that he was for twenty years or more the real head of the network of Milner Group units in the Dominion. He regularly wrote the Canadian articles in The Round Table magazine. When he died, in 1940, The Round Table obituary spoke of him as one of the most devoted and loyal friends that The Round Table has ever known. Indeed- he could fairly claim to be one of its founding fathers. In the 1930s he relinquished his central position in the Canadian branch of the Milner Group to Vincent Massey, son-in-law of George Parkin. Glazebrooks admiration for Parkin was so great that he named his son George Parkin de Twenebrokes Glazebrook.[4] At the present time Vincent Massey and G. P. de T. Glazebrook are apparently the heads of the Milner Group organization in Canada, having inherited the position from the latters father. Both are graduates of Balliol, Massey in 1913 and Glazebrook in 1924. Massey, a member of a very wealthy Canadian family, was lecturer in modern history at Toronto University in 1913-1915, and then served, during the war effort, as a staff officer in Canada, as associate secretary of the Canadian Cabinets War Committee, and as secretary and director of the Government Repatriation Committee. Later he was Minister without Portfolio in the Canadian Cabinet (1924), a member of the Canadian delegation to the Imperial Conference of 1926, and first Canadian Minister to the United States (1926-1930). He was president of the National Liberal Federation of Canada in 1932-1935, Canadian High Commission in London in 1935-1946, and Canadian delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1936. He has been for a long time governor of t e University of Toronto and of Upper Canada College (Parkins old school). He remains to this day one of the strongest supporters of Oxford University and of a policy of close Canadian cooperation with the United Kingdom. G. P. de T. Glazebrook, son of Milners old friend Arthur J. Glazebrook and namesake of Milners closest collaborator in the Rhodes Trust, was born in 1900 and studied at Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and Balliol. Since 1924 he has been teaching history at Toronto University, but since 1942 has been on leave to the Dominion government, engaged in strategic intelligence work with the Department of External Affairs. Since 1948 he has been on loan from the Department of External Affairs to the Department of Defense, where he is acting as head of the new Joint Services Intelligence. This highly secret agency appears to be the Canadian equivalent to the American Central Intelligence Agency. Glazebrook has written a number of historical works, including a History of Transportation in Canada (1938), Canadian External Affairs, a Historical Study to 1914 (1942), and Canada at the Peace Conference (1942). . It was, as we have said, George Parkin Glazebrooks father who, acting in cooperation with Curtis, Kerr, and Marris and on instructions from Milner, set up the Round Table organization in Canada in 1911. About a dozen units were established in various cities. It was during the effort to extend the Round Table organization to Australia that Curtis first met Lord Chelmsford. He was later Viceroy of India (in 1916-1921), and there can be little doubt that the Milner Group was influential in this appointment, for Curtis discussed the plans which eventually became the Government of India Act of 1919 with him before he went to India and consulted with him in India on the same subject in 1916. [5] From 1911 to 1913, Curtis remained in England, devoting himself to the reports coming in from the Round Table Groups on imperial organization, while Kerr devoted himself to the publication of The Round Table itself. This was an extraordinary magazine. The first issue appeared with the date 15 November 1910. It had no names in the whole issue, either of the officers or of the contributors of the five articles. The opening statement of policy was unsigned, and the only address to which communications could be sent was The Secretary, 175 Piccadilly, London, W. This anonymity has been maintained ever since, and has been defended by the journal itself in advertisements, on the grounds that anonymity gives the contributors greater in dependence and freedom. The real reasons, however, were much more practical than this and included the fact that the writers were virtually unknown and were so few in numbers, at first at least, as to make the project appear ridiculous had the articles been signed. For example, Philip Kerr, during his editorship, always wrote the leading article in every issue. In later years the anonymity was necessary because of the political prominence of some of the contributors. In general, the policy of the journal has been such that it has continued to conceal the identity of its writers until their deaths. Even then, they have never been connected with any specific article, except in the case of one article (the first one in the first issue) by Lord Lothian. This article was reprinted in The Round Table after the authors death in 1940. The Round Table was essentially the propaganda vehicle of a handful of people and could not have carried signed articles either originally, when they were too few, or later, when they were too famous. It was never intended to be either a popular magazine or self-supporting, but rather was aimed at influencing those in a position to influence public opinion. As Curtis wrote in 1920, A large quarterly like The Round Table is not intended so much for the average reader, as for those who write for the average reader. It is meant to be a storehouse of information of all kinds upon which publicists can draw. Its articles must be taken on their merits and as representing nothing beyond the minds and information of the individual writer of each.[6] It is perhaps worth mentioning that the first article of the first issue, called Anglo-German Rivalry, was very anti-German and forms an interesting bit of evidence when taken in connection with Curtiss statement that the problem of the Empire was raised in 1909 by the problem of what role South Africa would play in a future war with Germany. The Group, in the period before 1914, were clearly anti-German. This must be emphasized because of the mistaken idea which circulated after 1930 that the Cliveden group, especially men like Lord Lothian, were pro-German. They were neither anti-German in 1910 nor pro-German in 1938, but pro-Empire all the time, changing there their attitudes on other problems as these problems affected the Empire. And it should be realized that their love for the Empire was not mere jingoism or flag-waving (things at which Kerr mocked within the Group)7 but was based on the sincere belief that freedom, civilization, and human decency could best be advanced through the instrumentality of the British Empire. In view of the specific and practical purpose of The Round Table-to federate the Empire in order to ensure that the Dominions would join with the United Kingdom in a future war with Germany-the paper could not help being a propagandist organ, propagandist on a high level, it is true, but nonetheless a journal of opinion rather than a journal of information. Every general article in the paper (excluding the reports from representatives in the Dominions) was really an editorial- an unsigned editorial speaking for the group as a whole. By the 1920s these articles were declaring, in true editorial style, that The Round Table does not approve oP something or other, or, It seems to The Round Table that something else.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 18:54:43 +0000
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