Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

This famous Report of the Transvaal Indigency Commission, published in 1908, was written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and republished by the Union government twenty years later. About the same time, the group became convinced that black labor not only demoralized white labor and prevented it from acquiring the physical skills necessary for self-reliance and high personal morale but that blacks were capable of learning such skills as well as whites were. As Curtis expressed it in 1952: “I came to see how the colour bar reacted on Whites and Blacks. Exempt from drudgery by custom and law, Whites acquire no skill in crafts, because the school of skill is drudgery. The Blacks, by doing drudgery, acquire skill. All skilled work in mines such as rock-drilling was done by miners imported from Cornwall who worked subject to the colour bar. The heavy drills were fixed and driven under their direction by Natives. These Cornish miners earned £ 1 a day, the Natives about 25. The Cornish miners struck for higher pay, but the Blacks, who in doing the drudgery had learned how to work the drills, kept the mines running at a lower cost.”

Accordingly, the Milner-Round Table group worked out a scheme to reserve the tropical portions of Africa north of the Zambezi River for natives under such attractive conditions that the blacks south of that river would be enticed to migrate northward. As Curtis envisioned this plan, an international state or administrative body “would take over the British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese dependencies in tropical Africa.... Its policy would be to found north of the Zambezi a Negro Dominion in which Blacks could own land, enter professions, and stand on a footing of equality with Whites. The inevitable consequence would be that Black laborers south of the Zambezi would rapidly emigrate from South Africa and leave South African Whites to do their own drudgery which would be the salvation of the Whites.” Although this project has not been achieved, it provides the key to Britain’s native and central-African policies from 1917 onward. For example, in 1937-1939 Britain made many vain efforts to negotiate a settlement of Germany’s colonial claims under which Germany would renounce forever its claims on Tanganyika and be allowed to participate as a member of an international administration of all tropical Africa (including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola as well as British and French territory) as a single unit in which native rights would be paramount.

The British tradition of fair conduct toward natives and nonwhites generally was found most frequently among the best educated of the English upper class and among those lower-class groups, such as missionaries, where religious influences were strongest. This tradition was greatly strengthened by the actions of the Rhodes-Milner group, especially after 1920. Rhodes aroused considerable ill-feeling among the whites of South Africa when he announced that his program included “equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambezi,” and went on to indicate that “civilized men” included ambitious, literate Negroes. When Milner took over the Boer states in 1901, he tried to follow the same policy. The peace treaty of 1902 promised that the native franchise would not be forced on the defeated Boers, but Milner tried to organize the governments of municipalities, beginning with Johannesburg, so that natives could vote. This was blocked by the Kindergarten (led by Curtis who was in charge of municipal reorganization in 1901-1906) because they considered reconciliation with the Boers as a preliminary to a South African Union to be more urgent. Similarly, Smuts as the chief political figure in South Africa after 1910 had to play down native rights in order to win Boer and English labor support for the rest of his program.

The Rhodes-Milner group, however, was in a better position to carry out its plans in the non-self-governing portions of Africa outside the Union. In South Africa the three native protectorates of Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Basutoland were retained by the imperial authorities as areas where native rights were paramount and where tribal forms of living could be maintained at least partially. However, certain tribal customs, such as those which required a youth to prove his manhood by undergoing inhuman suffering or engaging in warfare or cattle stealing before he could marry or become a full-fledged member of the tribe, had to be curtailed. They were replaced in the twentieth century by the custom of taking work in the mines of South Africa as contract laborers for a period of years. Such labor was as onerous and killing as tribal warfare had been earlier because deaths from disease and accident were very high. But, by undergoing this test for about five years, the survivors obtained sufficient savings to allow them to return to their tribes and buy sufficient cattle and wives to support them as full members of the tribe for the rest of their days. Unfortunately, this procedure did not result in good agricultural practices but rather in overgrazing, growing drought and erosion, and great population pressure in the native reserves. It also left the mines without any assured labor supply so that it became necessary to recruit contract labor farther and farther north. Efforts by the Union government to set northern limits beyond which labor recruiting was forbidden led to controversy with employers, frequent changes in regulations, and widespread evasions. As a consequence of an agreement made by Milner with Portuguese authorities, about a quarter of the natives working in South African mines came from Portuguese East Africa even as late as 1936.

MAKING THE COMMONWEALTH, 1910-1926

As soon as South Africa was united in 1910, the Kindergarten returned to London to try to federate the whole empire by the same methods. They were in a hurry to achieve this before the war with Germany which they believed to be approaching. With Abe Bailey money they founded The Round Table under Kerr’s (Lothian’s) editorship, met in formal conclaves presided over by Milner to decide the fate of the empire, and recruited new members to their group, chiefly from New College, of which Milner was a fellow. The new recruits included a historian, F. S. Oliver, (Sir) Alfred Zimmern, (Sir) Reginald Coupland, Lord Lovat, and Waldorf (Lord) Astor. Curtis and others were sent around the world to organize Round Table groups in the chief British dependencies.

For several years (1910-1916) the Round Table groups worked desperately trying to find an acceptable formula for federating the empire. Three books and many articles emerged from these discussions, but gradually it became clear that federation was not acceptable to the English-speaking dependencies. Gradually, it was decided to dissolve all formal bonds between these dependencies, except, perhaps, allegiance to the Crown, and depend on the common outlook of Englishmen to keep the empire together. This involved changing the name “British Empire” to “Commonwealth of Nations,” as in the title of Curtis’s book of 1916, giving the chief dependencies, including India and Ireland, their complete independence (but gradually and by free gift rather than under duress), working to bring the United States more closely into this same orientation, and seeking to solidify the intangible links of sentiment by propaganda among financial, educational, and political leaders in each country.

Efforts to bring the dependencies into a closer relationship with the mother country were by no means new in 1910, nor were they supported only by the Rhodes-Milner group. Nevertheless, the actions of this group were all-pervasive. The poor military performance of British forces during the Boer War led to the creation of a commission to investigate the South African War, with Lord Esher (Brett) as chairman (1903). Among other items, this commission recommended creation of a permanent Committee of Imperial Defence. Esher became (unofficial) chairman of this committee, holding the position for the rest of his life (1905-1930). He was able to establish an Imperial General Staff in 1907 and to get a complete reorganization of the military forces of New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa so that they could be incorporated into the imperial forces in an emergency (1909-1912). On the committee itself he created an able secretariat which cooperated loyally with the Rhodes-Milner group thereafter. These men included (Sir) Maurice (later Lord) Hankey and (Sir) Ernest Swinton (who invented the tank in 1915). When, in 1916-1917, Milner and Esher persuaded the Cabinet to create a secretariat for the first time, the task was largely given to this secretariat from the Committee on Imperial Defence. Thus Hankey was secretary to the committee for thirty years (1908-1938), to the Cabinet for twenty-two years (1916-1938), clerk to the Privy Council for fifteen years (1923-1938), secretary-general of the five imperial conferences held between 1921 and 1937, secretary to the British delegation to almost every important international conference held between the Versailles Conference of 1919 and the Lausanne Conference of 1932, and one of the leading advisers to the Conservative governments after 1939.