Lionel Curtis
Round Table organizer and ideologist of imperial federation (1872-1955)
Also known as: Curtis, Lionel Curtis, Curtis's
Lionel George Curtis (1872-1955) was a member of Milner's Kindergarten and one of the most institutionally productive figures of the The Milner Group. He organized the Round Table groups across the British Dominions in 1909-1916, drafted The Commonwealth of Nations (1916), founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) at Versailles in 1919, and is credited by Quigley with co-organizing — with Colonel House's American counterparts — the joint planning that produced the Council on Foreign Relations.
Life
Curtis was born in 1872 and educated at Haileybury and New College, Oxford, where he overlapped with the New-College cohort that Milner would later recruit into the Kindergarten: Kerr, Brand, Patrick Duncan, Dougal Malcolm, and Waldorf Astor. He went to South Africa during the Boer War and joined Milner's administrative staff after the surrender. By 1906 he was in charge of municipal reorganization in Johannesburg, where he 'tried to organize the governments of municipalities, beginning with Johannesburg, so that natives could vote' (T&H 156). The Kindergarten blocked the proposal — reconciliation with the Boers preceded all other considerations — but Curtis's energy as an organizer was now permanently associated with the South African Union project that Brand, Duncan, and Curtis drafted into existence between 1907 and 1910.
Round Table organizer
After the Union of South Africa was achieved in 1910, Milner deputed Curtis to globalize the Kindergarten's organizational template. 'Curtis and others were sent around the world to organize Round Table groups in the chief British dependencies' (T&H 157). The Round Table groups — autonomous local cells in South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Britain — published the quarterly Round Table journal under Kerr's editorship from November 1910. Quigley records Curtis writing to Kerr in 1916 about J. R. Seeley, the Cambridge imperialist who was the Group's intellectual precursor: 'Seeley's results were necessarily limited by his lack of any knowledge at first hand either of the Dominions or of India. With the Round Table organization behind him Seeley by his own knowledge and tradition could have...' (AAE 24).
Chatham House and the architecture of Anglo-American policy
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Curtis was one of the chief — 'if not the chief' — founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (AAE 56). Sister institutes were set up in the Dominions and, critically, in the United States, where it took the form of the Council on Foreign Relations. Quigley treats this Anglo-American institutional pair as the most important external legacy of the The Milner Group: 'In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor family (owners of The Times). Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period 1919-1927' (T&H 145).
India and Ireland
After Versailles, Milner sent Curtis to India 'where he drew up the chief provisions of the Government of India Act of 1919' (T&H 159) — the act that introduced 'dyarchy' and the staged-self-government framework. Curtis was then 'appointed adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office' (T&H 187), the office headed by Milner and Amery, where he played a substantial role in the partition that produced the Irish Free State in 1921-1922. Lord Halifax attacked Curtis publicly in the House of Lords as 'a globe-trotting doctrinaire with a positive mania for constitution-mongering' (T&H 183) — the kind of in-house criticism Quigley occasionally cites to remind the reader that the Group was a tendency, not a uniform party.
Position in the Group
Quigley names Curtis among the 'inner core' of the Group's inner circle (AAE 42). After Milner's death in 1925, the leadership 'has probably been played by Robert Henry Brand (now Lord Brand)' but Curtis remained one of the three or four dominant figures, with Lothian and Brand, throughout the All Souls period (1922 onward) (AAE 4, 6). He is, with John Buchan, 'one of the few members of the inner circles of the Milner Group who have written about it in published work' (AAE 48). His own treatise The Commonwealth of God (1938) and his three-volume Civitas Dei (1934-37) tried to make the imperial-federation idea theologically respectable; Quigley treats these as ideological glosses on the Group's operational practice rather than as serious political theory. Curtis died in 1955.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 4 Quigley
From 1902 to 1925, Milner was leader, while Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lionel Curtis were probably the most important members. From 1925 to 1940, Kerr was leader, and since his death in 1940 this role has probably been played by Robert Henry Brand.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 6 Quigley
The fourth period, from about 1922 to the present, could be called the All Souls period and centers about Lord Lothian, Lord Brand, and Lionel Curtis.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 24 Quigley
Lionel Curtis, in a letter to Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) in November 1916, wrote: 'Seeley's results were necessarily limited by his lack of any knowledge at first hand either of the Dominions or of India.'
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 42 Quigley
Milner, Abe Bailey, George Parkin, Lord Selborne, Jan Smuts, A. J. Glazebrook, R. H. Brand (Lord Brand), Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Lionel Curtis, Geoffrey Dawson, H. A. L. Fisher, Edward Grigg, Leopold Amery, and Lord Astor.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 48 Quigley
He is important because he is (with Lionel Curtis) one of the few members of the inner circles of the Milner Group who have written about it in published work.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 157 Quigley
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.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 159 Quigley
sent Curtis to India (where he drew up the chief provisions of the Government of India Act of 1919), appointed Curtis to the post of Adviser on Irish Affairs (where he played an important role in granting dominion status to southern Ireland in 1921).