6 - Imperial questions

Summary

I was very pleased to read L.G.'s interview about ‘The Imperial Council’. Speaking through that megaphone our friend P.K. has a great chance of making himself heard throughout the Empire.

Milner to Sir Hugh Thornton, 3 February 1917, Milner Papers 19.

It has been possible, in examining domestic supply problems, foreign affairs, and the Irish question, to indicate the part played by the Garden Suburb in helping Lloyd George to run the government, to illustrate the defects in war-machinery which its work disclosed, and to assess its independent contribution to great events. Kerr's work on imperial policy speaks to the fourth question with which this book is concerned: the ideological colour of the Prime Minister's Secretariat and its importance in transmitting imperialist values to Lloyd George. Kerr's imperial and Indian responsibilities make the Garden Suburb an obvious place to look for signs of clandestine Milnerite influence on policy-making. Such signs, however, are rare and ambiguous. Although the years 1916 to 1918 have been identified as the high point of Round Table influence, that movement, the core of ‘Milnerism’ after 1909, had like the Liberal party shown evidence of deterioration before its collision with the rampant omnibus of war. The Round Table was inaugurated in 1909 by former associates of Milner in South Africa. It preserved a specious institutional continuity through its quarterly journal, which Kerr edited until December 1916. The movement's original commitment to closer imperial union through federation was nourished by anonymous articles in the quarterly, and by the indefatigable Lionel Curtis, whose series of memoranda culminated in 1916 in the publication of The Commonwealth of Nations.