Background
Viscount Milner, was born in Giessen, Hesse-Darmstadt, on March 23, 1854, the son of a British physician.
Viscount Milner, was born in Giessen, Hesse-Darmstadt, on March 23, 1854, the son of a British physician.
After high school in Tübingen, Germany, Milner was educated at King's College, London, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he struck up friendships with H. H. Asquith and Arnold Toynbee.
After a brief fling at journalism with the Pall Mall Gazette, Milner helped found a new university settlement in East London, Toynbee Hall. Later he secured a post in the financial administration of Egypt; he came home in 1892 to take over the chairmanship of the Board of Inland Revenue.
In the spring of 1897, two years after the notorious Jameson Raid, Milner was sent to South Africa in order to resolve the dispute between the Boers and the Britons. The new high commissioner quickly came to realize that "there is no way out of the political troubles . . . except reform in the Transvaal, or war." After a series of tortuous negotiations with the Boer leader Paul Kruger as well as with the government in London, South Africa, in October 1899, plunged into war. The British were ill prepared and it was not until one year later that Lord Roberts was able to put the Boers on the defense; a further eighteen months were required to subdue their guerrilla tactics. In 1900 Milner was appointed administrator of the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal; King Edward VII raised him to the peerage as Baron Milner, of St. James's, London, and Cape Town. The war was finally concluded through the Treaty of Vereeniging on May 31, 1902, and Milner was advanced to a viscountcy. He at once ended the nefarious system of concentration camps and brought to the Cape a host of former friends from Oxford or from Toynbee Hall, commonly called "Milner's kindergarten." Unfortunately for Milner, he agreed to staff the Rand gold mines by importing laborers under indenture from China, a policy that led to the great Liberal victory in the general election of 1906.
After his return in 1905 Milner avoided politics and worked on behalf of the Rio Tinto Company and the Rhodes Trust. He opposed the Liberal budget of 1909 and the resulting Parliamentary Bill of 1911, and he abhorred home rule, allying himself with Sir Edward Carson as well as organizing an English league of "Covenanters." The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought Milner back into politics, initially as head of a committee to increase food producton and later to enhance coal output.
On December 9,1916, Prime Minister David Lloyd George created a small War Cabinet of five men to run the war; Lord Milner quickly became the mainstay of the War Cabinet, which he saw as a vehicle with which to restore the New Imperialism. He brought members of his famous "kindergarten from Pretoria to London and made no secret of his disdain for "that mob . . . this rotten assembly at Westminster," preferring instead that policy be pursued by the gentlemen from Balliol College.
Milner accompanied the prime minister to Rome in January 1917, and helped establish the Supreme War Council against the express wish of Sir William Robertson, chief of the Imperial General Staff. One month later, Milner was sent to Petrograd to arrange the munitions supply to Russia, but the immediate outbreak of revolution in the Russian capital obfuscated his efforts. Milner objected to General Douglas Haig's attritional tactics in Flanders in 1917, and he actively worked behind the scenes to remove Wully Robertson from the Imperial General Staff.
When the German Michael offensive broke the French and British front near Amiens, Milner on March 24, 1918, crossed the Channel and two days later at Doullens convinced Premier Georges Clemenceau, an old friend, that Marshal Ferdinand Foch be appointed commander in chief of Allied armies in France. It was to be Milner s last major act as a member of the War Council; on April 19, 1918, he replaced Lord Derby as secretary of state for war. It was in this new capacity that Milner advocated Allied intervention in Russia in order, as he put it, to prevent "Germany like a boa constrictor, gradually swallowing Russia." Once the tide of war had been turned in the west, Milner favored the abolition of Prussian militarism and the Hohenzollern dynasty, but in October he warned against "denouncing the whole German nation as monsters of iniquity."
After the war, Milner accepted the post of secretary of the Colonial Office but retired from public service in February 1921 after vituperative attacks by Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe's press. He died at Sturry Court on May 13, 1925, in the knowledge that he had been accepted as chancellor-elect of Oxford University. In his posthumously published papers ("Credo"), Milner's concept of empire was perhaps most clearly stated: "I am an Imperialist and not a Little Englander, because I am a British Race Patriot."
Found among Milner's papers was his Credo, which was published to great acclaim.
I am a Nationalist and not a cosmopolitan .... I am a British (indeed primarily an English) Nationalist. If I am also an Imperialist, it is because the destiny of the English race, owing to its insular position and long supremacy at sea, has been to strike roots in different parts of the world. I am an Imperialist and not a Little Englander because I am a British Race Patriot ... The British State must follow the race, must comprehend it, wherever it settles in appreciable numbers as an independent community. If the swarms constantly being thrown off by the parent hive are lost to the State, the State is irreparably weakened. We cannot afford to part with so much of our best blood. We have already parted with much of it, to form the millions of another separate but fortunately friendly State. We cannot suffer a repetition of the process.
— Alfred Milner