When Rhodes died, according to Burnett and Games, “two things happened that bore great importance for the future of the AngloAmerican ‘special relationship’. Firstly, Milner took over leadership of the Round Table, and secondly, the massive fortune left in Cecil Rhodes’ will, enabled the setting up of the Rhodes Scholarships, which allowed selected students from all over the world to study at Oxford University [in England]. “These students would each have ‘impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life, the dream of the founder [Cecil Rhodes]’ – one-world government. The most famous of these students would be Bill Clinton [the 42nd president of the USA].” Membership of the Round Table was reserved exclusively for Britons. But later, Milner hired George Louis Beer, a historian at Columbia University, as his American correspondent to rewrite the story of the American War of Independence, and, as a bonus, honoured him with the first non-British membership of the Round Table. But Milner came unstuck when he tried to encourage Beer to set up an American subsidiary of the Round Table. The Columbia historian rejected the idea, because he knew that no American would join a movement to federate the British Empire. Instead, Beer pressed himself into the creation of the American version of the Round Table, totally independent of Milner’s Round Table, called the Inquiry, whose influence “would eventually dwarf that of its British counterpart. It would be linked with modern, present-day secret groups such as the Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission, and dwarf those too”.

The Inquiry In fact, the man credited with the actual founding of the Inquiry in 1917 was Colonel Edward Mandell House, the anonymous author of what became the influential book, Philip Dru: The Administrator. Mandell House, like Louis Beer, was an anglophile, and a first generation American of English ancestry. He joined ranks with the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Beer, and impressed upon his (House’s) friend and protéégéé President Woodrow Wilson with the ideas of setting up an “intelligence agency” for foreign affairs. The president agreed and funded the group through the secret President’s Fund for National Safety and Defence. The only condition President Wilson put down was that the “intelligence agency” should not be based in Washington DC. So Mandell House and his friends found a small office in the New York Public Library and pitched their camp there. Later, their colleague, James T. Shortwell, another historian of Columbia University, gave the group its name: the Inquiry. Soon Mandell House, an energetic man, had built the Inquiry into an organisation of 100 scholars who “gathered information and discussed the likely future state of the world after the defeat of the [German] Kaiser. They were committed to the concept of globalism with its removal of all economic barriers between nations and the creation of ‘a general association of nations’. Among the Inquiry researchers was the young Allen Dulles, future head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).” One other major contribution of Mandell House was the ideas in his novel, Philip Dru: The Administrator, which he wrote and published anonymously in 1912. “It was such an influential book,” say Burnett and Games, “that President Woodrow Wilson reorganised the United States’ financial structure in accordance with that described in it. “Wilson’s legislative programme similarly followed that outlined

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