g, civilisation stands for neither language nor
culture nor anything intellectual at all. It stands for something moral and
social and political. It means, in the first place, the establishment and
enforcement of the Rule of Law, as against anarchy on the one hand and
tyranny on the other; and, secondly, on the basis of order and justice,
the task of making men fit for free institutions, the work of guiding and
training them to recognise the obligations of citizenship, to subordinate
their own personal interests or inclinations to the common welfare, the
"commonwealth." That is what is meant when it is claimed that Great Britain
has done a "civilising" work both in India and in backward Africa. The
Germans reproach and despise us, we are told,[1] for our failure to spread
"English culture" in India. That has not been the purpose of British rule,
and Englishmen have been foolish in so far as they have presumed to attempt
it: England has to learn from Indian culture as India from ours. But to
have laid for India the foundations on which alone a stable society could
rest, to have given her peace from foes without and security within, to
have taught her, by example, the kinship of Power and Responsibility, to
have awakened the social conscience and claimed the public services of
Indians in the village, the district, the province, the nation, towards the
community of which they feel themselves to be members, to have found India
a continent, a chaos of tribes and castes, and to have helped her to
become a nation--that is not a task of English culture: it is a task of
civilisation.

[Footnote 1: For evidence of this see Cramb's _Germany and England_, p.
25.]

Law, Justice, Responsibility, Liberty, Citizenship--the words are
abstractions, philosophers' phrases, destitute, it might seem, of living
meaning and reality. There is no such thing as English Justice, English
Liberty, English Responsibility. The qualities that go to the making of
free and ordered institutions are not national but universal. They are no
monopoly of Great Britain. They are free to be the attributes of any race
or any nation. They belong to civilised humanity as a whole. They are part
of the higher life of the human race.

As such the Germans, if they recognised them at all, probably regarded
them. They could not see in them the binding power to keep a great
community of nations together. They could not realise that Justice and
Responsibility, if they ri