vast preventive.
The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences
that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the
future for themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men
held back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian
sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gagged
and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection breaks out
in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for inaction develops
stupendous absurdities. The other day the British Empire was taking off
and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for seditious emblems and
inscriptions....

In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our
chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness of
our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything with
India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club,
and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about "character," worship
of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men and
things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that
empty domination. Had we great schools and a powerful teaching, could we
boast great men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our lives,
then indeed it might be different. But a race that bears a sceptre must
carry gifts to justify it.

It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from India.
That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our bones to be
ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandon
India with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. We
train our future rulers in the public schools to have a very wholesome
respect for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite of
us, be it a man or a culture, or a native state, we shall be willing to
deal with it. We may or may not have a war, but our governing class will
be quick to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South
African diplomacy, and arrange for some settlement that will abandon
the reality, such as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The
conqueror DE FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy
at home will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly. I am
no believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and
less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of