30

Eastern Questions, 1917

GEORGE CURZON’S WORK in the War Cabinet was the most sustained, vital and concentrated he had been required to do since leaving India. In the intervening eleven years he had worked as hard as anyone, but his energies had been dispersed over a large number of different and often unconnected fields. Now again he was at the heart of things, one of the key members of the War Cabinet, meeting day after day with his colleagues to discuss and direct the main areas of the war effort. Although he complained, as always, of the quantity of work, he was delighted of course to be doing it.

Apart from Lloyd George, the crucial figures were Curzon and Milner. Henderson owed his position less to administrative ability than to the Prime Minister’s need for Labour support, while Bonar Law’s duties as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons required frequent absences which Curzon did not much regret: the smell of Law’s new and very rank cigars, he complained, was ‘most offensive’. Observers such as L.S. Amery praised Curzon’s industry, knowledge and power of draftsmanship, yet regarded Milner as more influential and ‘the acknowledged mainstay’ of the group. Hankey, who remained Cabinet Secretary under Lloyd George, appreciated Curzon’s ‘unique gift of setting out in proper perspective and with eloquence the facts of a complicated issue’, but noted that he lacked resource in finding solutions to the problems he could state so well.1 In subsequent years Churchill and others remarked on the same defect, which no one had accused him of in India and which was also absent when he served under Bonar Law and Baldwin. It seems to have been almost exclusively associated with his years under Lloyd George.

Curzon now became a committee man. Apart from attendance at the War Cabinet, which met seven to nine times a week on all days except Sunday, he was required to be the chairman or a member of a large number of subcommittees. Lloyd George tended to respond to a problem by setting up a committee under Curzon or Milner to investigate it and report back to the War Cabinet. Economic questions went to Milner, and almost everything else ended up with the Lord President. While he was the obvious choice for the chairmanship of committees on the Middle East, and even for one contemplating the exchange of Gibraltar for Ceuta, Curzon was on less congenial ground in charge of deliberations on timber, merchant shipping, import restrictions, the allocation of guns, and a settlement for Ireland; and he was particularly disconcerted to discover that as Lord President he automatically became head of the Department for Scientific and Industrial Research. Work on these and other committees tended to be frustrating as well as laborious. Much of Curzon’s time was spent interviewing experts who disagreed with each other, before having, as a complete non-expert, to adjudicate. In April 1917 he was asked by the War Cabinet to decide whether the country should build ‘mammoth’ merchant ships that might or might not prove unsinkable. Confronted by Admiralty advice to go ahead and a warning from the Shipping Board to desist, he recommended that one should be built as an experiment.2

Curzon was undoubtedly vain about his contribution to this type of work. Perusing the minutes of one subcommittee and noting that his name seldom appeared, he asked Amery, its secretary, whether he had a ‘personal down’ on him. He was partially satisfied, according to Amery, by the assurance that he had been fulfilling his role as chairman by eliciting members’ views and summing them up in his conclusion.3 But he was not at all mollified by a very long explanation of a similar omission from Hankey. To Curzon’s protest that his decisive contribution to a discussion about the War Museum had not been included in the Cabinet’s minutes, Hankey replied that, if he had been speaking on India or some other subject on which he was an expert, his remarks would have been included as fully as possible. But on questions such as the War Museum, where he spoke ‘rather as a member of the Cabinet than as a special expert’, his comments had been incorporated anonymously in a résumé of the discussion. The suggestion that he was not an expert on cultural matters, recorded Hankey, provoked ‘such a catalogue of Curzon’s contributions to art galleries and museums and so forth, not only in this country but in India and elsewhere, as took my breath away. It was some time before my lapse was forgiven and forgotten!’4

At the end of March 1917 the members of the War Cabinet joined other ministers and representatives from the Dominions in the Imperial War Cabinet, a gathering reflecting the enhanced wartime status of the empire’s components which sat three times a week until the beginning of May. Its principal work was entrusted to two subcommittees, inevitably headed by Curzon and Milner, appointed respectively to examine war aims and acceptable terms for peace. Curzon’s group, which included Long, Chamberlain and Smuts, the South African Defence Minister, as well as the Prime Ministers of Canada and New Zealand, set to work and produced a rather hawkish report considered by the Imperial War Cabinet on 1 May. Curzon argued that German East Africa, which had been mainly conquered by Smuts, should never be handed back because of its potential use as a submarine base from which to attack Britain’s sea communications. He also urged the retention of Palestine, which had not yet been captured, as well as Mesopotamia, but left open the question of German West Africa, which would be restored to the enemy in return for the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine. When Lloyd George observed that the subcommittee seemed rather greedy, recommending that Britain should acquire so much more than the French or the Russians, Chamberlain suggested that France might receive the German colonies in West Africa in addition to Alsace-Lorraine, while Russia would have Armenia.fn1 In accepting the arguments of the report, the Prime Minister stressed that they should be regarded as recommendations rather than instructions to future delegates.5

The question of the captured German colonies continued to exercise Curzon for the rest of the war, and in the end his views largely prevailed over those of Lloyd George, Balfour and Henderson. He had never wanted to extend India’s responsibilities in any direction, but Turkey’s declaration of war had resulted in the occupation of Mesopotamia, an area which could not be handed back now, he thought, without breaking Britain’s pledges to the local Arabs and giving renewed life to ‘the shattered German ambition of a great Teutonised dominion’ stretching through Europe and Asia Minor to the Gulf.6 As for Africa, he believed that without Germany the continent had a chance of civilized development. But an Africa with a Teutonic presence would become ‘a cockpit of sanguinary conflicts and pernicious ambitions’.7

Once the principle of an Africa without Germans had been accepted, Curzon had to contend with suggestions that it should be divided between other people. To a proposal that German East Africa should be handed over to Indian colonization, he countered that the soil belonged to the natives and warned against the planting of exotic customs and society in an alien continent.8 And to a paper from Balfour, in which the Foreign Secretary suggested giving the captured territories to Britain’s allies or submitting them to a condominium of European powers, he replied with a catalogue of objections to all conceivable candidates. Why, he asked, should German East Africa be given to France, which was already in possession of Togoland and the Cameroons (won partly by British troops), when she had ‘neither interests, rights, nor concern’ in the region. And if France, the only other serious colonial power, was excluded, it surely could not be contemplated increasing the possessions of Belgium, ‘who already has more of Africa than she can conveniently and properly administer’, or of Portugal, ‘incurably incapable of ruling or keeping anything, except by virtue of her weakness’, or of Italy, ‘who has no connection whatever with this part of Africa, and has shown herself in other regions of that continent the most unaccommodating of allies and neighbours’.9

The three blocs of Germany’s African territories were eventually divided, in roughly equal proportions, between Britain, France and the Union of South Africa. Curzon’s reasons for excluding Germany and the minor Allied powers might sound jingoistic, but they were logical. If the Germans had been allowed to stay in Africa – as Churchill suggested in 1918 – the continent would have become far more than ‘a cockpit of sanguinary conflicts’ in 1940. Curzon’s views were the product of strategic foresight and awareness of the colonial performances of Belgium, Italy and Portugal. The extension of British rule was not an aim in itself, for his view of empire, focused on Asia and the Dominions, had little room for Africa. He recognized the importance of the Cape and admired the vision of Rhodes, but he was unmoved by most of the continent. The colonization of East Africa was far from being his idea of imperial trusteeship. He would have hated – as he did in India – the racism of the planters, and he would have been disgusted by the society of Kenya’s ‘Happy Valley’, so much more frivolous and debauched than Simla.

Five months of the Cabinet, the subcommittees and the Imperial War Cabinet practically knocked Curzon out. During the comparatively idle months under Asquith, his health had stood up well: apart from a brief convalescence after breaking his elbow in the spring of 1916, he had barely missed a meeting of the Cabinet or the Dardanelles Committee until severe backaches laid him out in October. But by the end of May 1917 he was on the verge of a breakdown, his private secretary told Hankey, and needed a holiday. The Cabinet Secretary informed Lloyd George, who said he had heard Curzon was ‘so done’ that he sometimes burst into tears.10 Yet since the next few weeks were expected to determine the country’s strategy for the rest of the war, no opportunity for a holiday arose. That summer yielded, however, a personal vindication that did him as much good as any holiday.

Curzon had not been averse to campaigning against Turkey in Syria: he would have liked to send an expeditionary force to cut the Hejaz railway in 1914, and the following year he supported the proposal to land troops at Alexandretta. But he was wary of more entanglements and consequently more commitments in the Middle East. Sceptical of proposals for an Arab caliphate and a tribal revolt in Arabia, he deprecated the idea of promising the Arabs an enormous state on former Ottoman territory. Britain would be in a very unfortunate position, he told Cromer in April 1915, if she gave them pledges which she failed to redeem.11 But once they had erroneously been made, he saw no option but to honour them. Britain ‘must be very careful’, he told his Cabinet colleagues in October 1917, ‘that any peace programme did not work to the detriment of the Arabs and the promises’ made to them.12 He thus opposed commitments made to other peoples in the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration.

Curzon was equally cautious about extending Britain’s commitments in Arab lands further east. He agreed with the occupation of Basra, which protected Britain’s position in the Gulf and her oil interests in Persia, but he thought it would be foolhardy to advance up the Tigris to Baghdad. Such an operation, he observed in March 1915, would involve defending an enormous area of Mesopotamia, taking over part of Persia’s neutral zone to protect it, and in the process acquiring a coterminous frontier with Russia which would have to be held with Indian troops.13 On joining the Government, he argued against the proposed advance later in the year. It would lead to the dispersal and weakening of British forces, he told the Dardanelles Committee, leaving them exposed to a German swoop through Mosul or a Turkish flank attack on Basra; moreover, a small British army at Baghdad, at the end of long and difficult communications, would be in a precarious position, liable to be cut off and surrounded.

Kitchener suggested that the British might raid Baghdad, destroy everything of military value and then withdraw, an action that would hardly have endeared them to the Arabs or added to Britain’s prestige in the area. But the strongest advocates of an advance on the ancient Abbasid capital were Grey, who was still Foreign Secretary, and Balfour, neither of whom had been near the place and who were quite ignorant of local conditions. Baghdad’s capture, pronounced Grey, would have a great effect on the Arabs and bring them over to the British side. Balfour agreed with the Foreign Secretary, declaring that the offensive was a gamble worth taking.14 As Curzon later reported to General Townshend, the officer entrusted with the advance, the Cabinet then opted for ‘a splashy and momentary triumph at the cost, or at least the risk of subsequent reverse and disaster’.15 The wrong decision was taken against the advice of the best informed minister, an occurrence with which Curzon was by now familiar. As he told his former foe Repington, who like Chirol thought the expedition was folly, ‘anyone who knows any particular subject connected with the war is sure to be overruled when the subject is discussed’.16

British troops finally entered Baghdad in March 1917, seventeen months and several disasters after the Cabinet’s decision to go there. Advancing up the Tigris in November 1915, Townshend’s 14,000 men had been defeated by a larger Turkish force at the Battle of Ctesiphon. Losing a third of their strength in that encounter, they had then retreated down river to Kut el-Amara, where the rest of the force was lost during the subsequent siege and surrender. In the meantime thousands of other troops had perished in attempts to relieve them from Basra. It was a humiliation to rival Yorktown and Kabul, an almost unique combination of strategic blunders, tactical mistakes and organizational incompetence. Medical facilities on the Tigris were scandalous, worse than anything experienced by a British army since the Crimea.

The campaign was conducted under the orders of the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Sir Beauchamp Duff, a desk officer who had never commanded so much as a regiment and who owed his appointment to his service as Kitchener’s Chief of Staff. Having to combine the duties of C-in-C with the advisory role of the former Military Member, Duff remained at the Viceroy’s side at Simla during the campaign. He did not go to the operational headquarters at Basra; he did not even visit Bombay, where the troops embarked and whence the wounded returned, nor did he station any member of his staff there to find out what was going on. He seldom left his office and yet refused to let anything be decided outside his office. When Sir George Buchanan, sent from Burma to advise the military authorities in Basra, gave Duff a report, the Commander-in-Chief ‘assured him it disclosed a state of affairs of which he had not the remotest conception’.17

From Bombay Valentine Chirol was in a good position to appreciate the absurdity of the military system set up by Kitchener and Brodrick ten years earlier. ‘No man’, he reported, ‘ever could be both head of a great military administration and at the same time C-in-C – least of all in war time.’18 A good many people were coming to agree with him. There were even grudging admissions from its perpetrators that the scheme which had brought down the Viceroy in 1905 might have been mistaken. So far as the failures in Mesopotamia were due to his reforms, Midleton told Curzon at the end of 1916, ‘I am ready to take my share [of the blame] if any is due to me’; he believed, however, that no system could have made up for the failings of the men fighting the campaign.19 A more candid and revealing admission came from Kitchener even before the disasters had occurred. Talking in the summer of 1915 to General Barrow, who was now Military Secretary at the India Office, the War Secretary ‘expressed himself very forcibly about the shortcomings of Duff’ and his staff at Army Headquarters. After Barrow protested that ‘they were his own nominees and the system his own making, Kitchener retorted, “We shall have to revive the Military Department to keep them all in order and impose a little sense into them”.’ When Barrow replied, ‘That was always my view,’ the former C-in-C ‘smiled grimly’.20

Kitchener witnessed the Mesopotamian débâcle from afar but did not live to read the official report that damned his system. Nor did several of the staff officers who had helped him set it up: Maxwell and Hamilton were killed on the Western Front in October 1914; Marker died of wounds a year later. Voluntary incarceration at Simla spared Duff, however, and enabled him to study the Royal Commission’s verdict on his performance, his inability to fulfil the duties entrusted to him, and the ‘astounding system’ which had ‘only to be described to be condemned’. Trying to manage the expedition from Simla, he read, was like using Thurso or Wick as headquarters for the Western Front.21 Asked to analyse the report for the benefit of the War Cabinet, Curzon remarked on Duff’s unsuitability as C-in-C, his responsibility for the system that had broken down, and his ‘degree of culpability which [had] seldom been exceeded in modern times’. He was also highly critical of Surgeon-General Hathaway, whose ignorance and negligence merited dismissal from the service, and General Nixon, who had first urged the capture of Baghdad and who ‘had made every consideration of prudence and foresight bend to the requirements of this overmastering desire’.22

The report was widely seen as a vindication of Curzon’s struggle twelve years earlier. The current Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, observed that it was ‘not often that a man in his lifetime has his prophecies fulfilled’, but in this case Curzon had been thoroughly justified. Milner wrote with a similar message and said the report had confirmed his opinion that ‘we never had a better man in India than yourself’.23 Gratified though he was by the plaudits, Curzon remained bitter about the attitude of the last Unionist Cabinet. ‘Of one thing I am certain,’ he told Grace: ‘not one of my then colleagues from Balfour downwards will say one word to me in acknowledgement of their error or regret for the great wrong that they did me at that critical moment of my career.’24 The grievance was somewhat exaggerated. At least two of them, Lansdowne and Chamberlain, admitted he had been right, and three others who might have done so – Lyttelton, Wyndham and Arnold-Forster – were dead. Unrepentance seems to have been restricted to Balfour, Midleton, Salisbury and Derby.

In the House of Lords debate on the report, Lansdowne blamed the Mesopotamian fiasco on the changes that had turned the Commander-in-Chief into a bureaucrat. Had there been a Military Member or even a Military Supply Member to advise the Viceroy, Duff could have gone to the Front or at any rate to Bombay. Later, after the Under-Secretary for India, Lord Islington, had cited over-centralization as the cause of the breakdown, Midleton rose to defend his abolition of the Military Department and to claim that the fault was Morley’s for getting rid of the MSM. But although he was unable to admit publicly his recent doubts on the matter, he did pay a gratuitous tribute to Curzon. In a passage combining a swipe at Hardinge with an oblique attempt at atonement, Midleton asserted that Curzon as Viceroy would never have stayed at Simla nor allowed the C-in-C to remain there throughout the operations. The following afternoon, after Curzon had ridiculed the idea that the MSM could have averted the disaster, Midleton passed him a note along the benches: ‘May I say how fine I thought your speech, though you will not expect me to endorse every paragraph? It was like old times. St. J.B.’25

In his speech Curzon defended General Barrow, whose role at the India Office had been criticized unfairly by the report, and Chamberlain who, as Secretary of State, felt he had to do ‘the right thing and resign’. Curzon congratulated his colleague for his ‘punctilious and honourable chivalry’ and wrote of the ‘absurd illogicality’ which condemned him ‘while leaving others untouched’.26 The last phrase was presumably a reference to Hardinge. The soldiers criticized most severely in the report never held an official post again, but Hardinge had returned from India to resume his old job as head of the Foreign Office. Plainly more culpable for the débâcle than Chamberlain, his position appeared untenable after the publication of the Commission’s findings. Hardinge had vigorously urged Duff’s appointment as C-in-C and had later insisted on keeping him at Simla; he had also been an ardent promoter of the advance on Baghdad during which he had sent Chamberlain Panglossian reports on the military and medical situations. Believing that the interests of the Government and the Foreign Office required his resignation, the members of the War Cabinet deputed Curzon to tell him their views. In his memoirs, which reinforce Crawford’s view of their author as a ‘monument of vanity and fussiness’, Hardinge gives an improbable account of their interview at which he claims to have argued so powerfully that Curzon ‘slunk’ from his room ‘like a whipped hound’.27 In fact he owed his survival to his chief, Balfour, who seldom otherwise got heated about anyone’s career, even his own. In the Commons the Foreign Secretary defended Hardinge in a petulant speech, recorded Crawford, which showed A.J.B. ‘really at his worst, resembling an angry schoolgirl’ and reminding his colleague of his ‘deplorable controversy’ over the Air Board.28

In the autumn of 1917 it dawned on Curzon that the British were about to make another blunder in the Middle East. Almost submerged by the problems of his subcommittees, he had paid little attention to the Government’s negotiations with the Zionist movement. Indeed, he seems to have been scarcely aware of those strange combinations of romanticism and strategic reasoning, zealotry and altruism, pro-Jewish sympathy and professed anti-Semitism that were converting so many leading politicians – Balfour, Lloyd George and Milner above all – into champions of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.fn2 He did not intervene until reading a paper circulated at the end of August by Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s Government, who denounced Zionism as ‘a mischievous political creed’ that would promote anti-Semitism and jeopardize the status of Jews living outside Palestine. It was in any case a futile aspiration, argued Montagu, because the land could not hold more than a third of the world’s Jews even if all its other inhabitants were driven out.30

Curzon agreed with Montagu’s arguments. Having ridden over the country, he thought it unsuitable for large-scale Jewish immigration from Europe. ‘I cannot conceive a worse bondage’, he told Montagu, ‘to which to relegate an advanced and intellectual community than to exile in Palestine.’ He also saw there was room for only a small portion of the Jewish people. One could not ‘expel the present Moslem population’, he believed, nor ‘turn all the various sects, religions and denominations out of Jerusalem’.31

Balfour and Montagu came to the War Cabinet to argue their cases on 4 October. The Foreign Secretary believed that a pro-Zionist declaration was necessary to pre-empt a similar announcement from Germany and to gain the support of American Jews, who might provide financial aid to the Allies, and Russian Jews who, despite the turmoil of their country, might help persuade their Government to stay in the war. Montagu stuck to the issue of British Jewry, arguing that its homeland was Britain rather than Palestine, and pointing out that most English-born Jews were opposed to Zionism. Concentrating the discussion on Palestine and its inhabitants, Curzon asked his colleagues how it was ‘proposed to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place?’ Afterwards he returned to the point in a paper for the Cabinet. ‘What is to become of the people of the country?’ They had been there for 1,500 years, they owned and worked the soil, and they would not be content ‘either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water’ for the Zionists. Besides, Jerusalem was a city in which too many peoples and too many religions had ‘a passionate and permanent interest’ for it to become a future Jewish capital.32

Curzon’s intervention was too late to affect an issue on which he was almost unanimously opposed by his colleagues. At a meeting of the War Cabinet on 31 October, he once again stated his misgivings but admitted the force of Balfour’s diplomatic arguments in favour of a pro-Zionist declaration. He warned, however, against raising false expectations and urged the use of guarded language.33 The Balfour Declaration, embodied in a letter to Lord Rothschild on 2 November, was certainly a more cautious document than its author had originally intended. The Foreign Secretary’s assertion of ‘the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people’ was replaced by Milner’s milder statement that ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.34 The final version of the letter deferred to the anxieties of both Curzon and Montagu by declaring that nothing would be done which might ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries’.

‘One of Curzon’s characteristic weaknesses’, wrote Churchill after his death, ‘was that he thought too much about stating his case, and too little about getting things done.’35 At first sight this criticism might seem justified by his behaviour over the Balfour Declaration, for he acquiesced in a policy which he knew to be mistaken and which proved to be disastrous both for British interests in the Middle East and for the indigenous people of Palestine. Yet it is difficult to see what Curzon could have done apart from resigning over a minor issue concerning a small area still under Turkish rule at a time when the Bolsheviks were seizing power in Russia and British soldiers were dying in their thousands at Passchendaele. He had no hope of converting Balfour or the War Cabinet to his point of view. The Foreign Secretary was committed to Zionism – one of his officials thought he never cared passionately about anything else36 – and could not be influenced by anxieties over the fate of Palestine’s current inhabitants. As he later told Curzon, ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’.37

The debate over the Balfour Declaration was one of a series between 1905 and 1923 in which Curzon won the argument and Balfour won the battle. As with India and Mesopotamia, Curzon was familiar with the area and its inhabitants, and his experience made him doubt that they could absorb a Jewish influx from Europe: indeed he predicted, accurately as it happened, that Zionism could not be established without the removal of many of the native Arabs. Balfour, by contrast, knew and cared nothing about Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. He was a Zionist because he admired Weizmann and Jewish culture and because he hoped to see in Palestine a sort of modern equivalent of Classical Athens. No doubt he believed in the pro-Zionist diplomatic arguments he expounded, although in the event these turned out to be illusory: his Declaration had no effect, for example, on the actions of Trotsky and other Bolshevik Jews. But his real impulse was romantic, intellectual and politically frivolous. As Chief Secretary of Ireland he had experienced the problem of sectarianism and had striven to contain it. Yet in Palestine he promoted a more spectacular and intransigent antagonism without making any attempt to understand or reassure one of the parties involved. A century of conflict has been the result.

One area of the world Curzon still watched closely, although he had no official connection with it, was the Subcontinent. Crawford once observed that Curzon did not like people talking about India unless they had ‘qualified by a five year residence, preferably seven’.38 It was an unkind jibe coming from Crawford, whom Curzon had tried to have appointed Viceroy after Hardinge, but it was not entirely unfair. Curzon was liberal with advice to successive Viceroys and Secretaries of State, putting forward names, recommending policies, trying to resuscitate favourite schemes like the Cadet Corps or commissions for Indians in the army. Chamberlain had been amenable – in favour of Crawford’s candidacy, sympathetic on the question of military administration, and sceptical about transferring the capital to Delhi. But his successor, Edwin Montagu, was less congenial to the former Viceroy. Although he and Curzon had been equally critical of the Balfour Declaration, they agreed on little else. An ambitious and highly intelligent politician, Montagu was a fractious and abrasive colleague, quick to take umbrage and excelling even Curzon in his determination to pursue a grievance or an argument until the last point had been cleared up. As Undersecretary with Crewe he had derided Curzon’s views on India, and he had later urged Asquith to sack both Curzon and Churchill for their stance on Gallipoli. In 1917 he was reluctant to become Secretary of State for fear of being blocked by Curzon and manacled by the Council of India whenever he tried to intitiate reforms. Curzon did not want him in the post either, because he thought Montagu’s programme of ‘Federal Home Rule for India’ would excite ‘prodigious expectations’ which could not be realized. He was ‘rather a strong partisan of Montagu’, he told Lloyd George, but warned that as Indian Secretary he would try to drag the Government ‘into a policy where some would find it impossible to follow’.39

The new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, had convinced Chamberlain that the circumstances of the war required some public statement on Britain’s eventual goal in India. In the past Conservative statesmen had believed there was no goal beyond the maintenance of ever higher standards of British rule, while Liberals had tried not to think about an ultimate aim but to concentrate rather on a slow and piecemeal extension of Indian liberties. The Minto-Morley reforms of 1909 had put Indians on the executive councils and increased the size and representative element of the legislative councils. Eight years later Montagu was eager to go beyond this modest advance and encourage the development of Indian institutions, a process he hoped would eventually culminate in self-government within the empire.

Curzon realized that such a step could not be avoided. The wartime atmosphere, stirred by the Russian Revolution, the growing demands of Congress since the death of its moderate leader Gokhale, and above all ‘the free talk about liberty, democracy, nationality, and self-government which had become the common shibboleths of the Allies’, meant that substantial concessions would have to be made. It was plainly anomalous, for example, to have three Indians accredited to the Imperial War Cabinet in London while their countrymen enjoyed negligible political power in India and were still unable to hold commissions in the army. Curzon admitted that he was more interested in granting the commissions, a proposal he had urged eighteen years before, and in setting up an advisory Council of Princes than in ‘the dissemination of parliamentary institutions’. But he did not ‘dissent from the broad view’ that it was desirable to state that ‘self-government within the British Empire is the goal at which we aim’ so long as it was made clear that it was ‘under British guidance that this end must be pursued, and can alone be achieved’, and that the essential safeguards of British justice and British power would not be weakened. Britain must guide the process steadily, he told his colleagues, gradually increasing Indian participation in government, carefully nurturing the new representative institutions, and waiting until India could manage both her defences and her domestic concerns before allowing her ‘to claim the rights of a self-governing nation’.40

The wording of the statement of aim was discussed at meetings of the War Cabinet attended by other senior ministers in August 1917. Montagu had proposed a simple sentence, stating that the Governments of Britain and India had ‘in view the gradual development of free institutions in India with a view to ultimate self-government within the Empire’. But in a note regarded by Curzon as ‘very stubborn and rather reactionary’, Balfour objected to the use of the word ‘self-government’. ‘East is East and West is West’, A.J.B. told his colleagues, and even in the West parliamentary institutions had ‘rarely been a great success, except amongst the English-speaking peoples’.41

Curzon thought ‘self-government’ was a misleading phrase which, ‘as understood and desired by the extremists, would simply mean setting up a narrow oligarchy of clever lawyers’. He therefore suggested that Montagu amend his phrase to read ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the fuller realization of responsible government in India under the aegis of the Crown’. This formula, accompanied by a declaration favouring ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the Administration’, was approved by the War Cabinet on 14 August with the word ‘fuller’ substituted at Montagu’s behest by ‘progressive’ – an important change because ‘fuller’ does not imply that something will become full, whereas ‘progressive’ indicates a continuous progress until, in this case, responsible government is realized. Informing Chamberlain afterwards that the meeting had gone ‘as merrily as a wedding feast’, Curzon told him that he and Montagu had defeated Derby, Carson and others on the issue of Indian commissions, that they had agreed on the wording of the pronouncement, and that he had successfully supported Montagu’s request to visit India to investigate how the statement could be embodied in a constitutional form. Yet although it appeared that the Victorian proconsul himself had embraced ‘the common shibboleths of the Allies’, the declaration was still open to misinterpretation. For Curzon it did not mean a handover of power within the foreseeable future but a developing process, he told the Cabinet, which might extend for hundreds of years.42

After a winter tour of India, Montagu came back with a scheme whereby native ministers, chosen by elected members of enlarged provincial legislatures, would run various ‘transferred subjects’ such as health, education and agriculture, while the local governor would retain control over finance, the police and other ‘reserved’ matters. The proposed form of government, later known as the dyarchy, appalled Curzon, who believed it would lead to federalism and a parliamentary system. Asked to comment on Montagu’s report for the Cabinet, he alleged that the scheme would create a revolution in the governing relations between Britain and India, ‘a revolution all the more incalculable’ because parts of the plan were clearly a transitory expedient that would provoke early agitation for further concessions.43

Astonished by this note, Montagu claimed that his proposals were based on the principles of the declaration they had jointly composed the previous August. As he rightly saw, dyarchy was a step towards ‘the progressive realization of responsible Government in India’; and as Curzon rightly feared, it was a step towards the dismantling of the empire. The former Viceroy wanted the ‘progressive realization’ to be an extremely slow process and was horrified that Montagu should have returned from India with radical proposals which he wanted to have rapidly enacted. Chamberlain tried to persuade the Secretary of State to be more tactful and less impatient. ‘We ought to be particularly conciliatory and forbearing’, he told him in July 1918 because, in accepting the reforms, Curzon was having to relinquish the ideas of a lifetime.44 But Montagu was neither tactful nor patient by nature. When Curzon reluctantly agreed to the setting up of two committees to examine the functioning of the dyarchy, the Secretary of State suggested the appointment of a third to investigate future changes in relations between the British and Indian Governments. Coming simultaneously with a proposal to nominate extra Indian ICS officers, the idea exasperated Curzon. ‘In many respects I have gone very far,’ he told Montagu, ‘but the sense of being perpetually pushed does not heighten one’s zest in going further.’

Why is it necessary to proceed at breakneck speed in a case that constitutes a revolution of which not one person in a thousand in this country realizes the magnitude, and which will probably lead by stages of increasing speed to the ultimate disruption of the Empire?45

After reading this letter with ‘intense dismay’, Montagu drafted an angry reply which his predecessor advised him not to send. Curzon was ‘uneasy, nervous and in consequence a little irritable’, Chamberlain said, and the draft would not be ‘the best salve for a person in his condition’.46 The Secretary of State reluctantly took the advice. Although his tongue as well as his pen frequently ran away with him, Montagu knew he needed Curzon’s support if his reforms were to be accepted by a House of Lords in which many Unionists with Indian experience were likely to be hostile. He therefore tried to associate him with the measure at each stage of its development. In October 1918 Curzon co-operated with suggestions for a Cabinet note by Montagu and with a speech in the Lords defending the Government’s procedure over the Report. But he was too disenchanted with the proposals themselves to serve on the Cabinet committee appointed to prepare legislation. When the Bill came up for its Second Reading in December 1919, Curzon told the Lords it was a ‘daring experiment’ which was unlikely to lead to better government. But he accepted it as necessary because in that age of nationalism and self-determination people attached ‘much more importance to being governed, even though not so well governed, by themselves, than they do to being even superbly governed by another race.’47 It was a phenomenon he had recognized in Persia thirty years before, but one which he had hoped would never arise in India.