th blood and left half of
it at least plunged in black ruin. We have preached to Indians, not
untruly, but with an insistence that seems to them now more than ever to
savour of self-righteousness, that our superior civilisation redeemed
them out of the anarchy and strife which devastated India before British
rule brought her peace and order and justice. Now they ask themselves
how it comes, then, that the Western civilisation which they are told to
thank for their own salvation has not saved Europe itself from the chaos
which has overtaken it to-day. Still more searching are the questions
that they ask when they see the great powers that have been fortunate
enough to emerge victorious from the struggle still postulating the
superiority of Western civilisation as sufficient grounds for denying to
other races who do not share it or have only recently come under its
influence the right to equal treatment. Their gorge rises most of all
when Western civilisation actually bases its claim to superiority not on
ethical but on racial grounds, and nations that profess to be followers
of Christ, Himself of Asiatic birth and descent, carve out the world
which He died to save--not for the benefit of one race alone--into
water-tight compartments, from some of which the Asiatic is to be
excluded by a colour-bar, but to all of which the white man is to have
access for such purposes and by such means as he himself deems right. If
the British Empire stands for a merely racial civilisation of which the
benefit is reserved for the white man only, what, they ask, is the value
of a promise of partnership in it when Indians are _ipso facto_ racially
disqualified from partnership?

There lies the rub. The argument may have been stated in an extreme
form, but it has to be faced, for it goes home to many Indians who would
not be moved by Mr. Gandhi's cruder abuse of a "Satanic" civilisation.
The overshadowing danger, and not in India alone, may be to-morrow, if
not already to-day, that of a racial conflict. Is there any other way to
avert it than by a frank recognition of racial equality in the sense of
equality of rightful opportunity for both races, Asiatic and European?
It is only in that sense that racial equality, like the equality already
recognised of all men born to our common British nationhood, can have
any meaning. For in the strict sense of the word no two men are born
equal, either physically or intellectually, any more than there is