equal terms in
a common struggle, of equal opportunities of sacrifice in common. It was
nobly conceived in the womb of war. Will it have died with the war? Or
will it survive and be extended to the discussion of Imperial questions
already preoccupying the Indian mind in which competitive rather than
common interests will have to be reckoned with--fiscal questions,
questions relating to India's share in the defence of the Empire and of
India's right to develop and control her own military and perhaps some
day her own naval forces, questions affecting the common rights of
British citizenship and the organic constitution of the Empire?
Obviously in none of these questions can India expect her views and
interests always to prevail. What she claims is that her voice be heard
and listened to, not as that of an inferior supplicating for boons but
with the deference and the desire for an agreed settlement by mutual
consent to which the promise of equal partnership already, she holds,
entitles her. That claim she will press, too, in questions affecting the
status and rights of her people in the Dominions and in the Colonies
with the insistence born of a new sense of nationhood which has
intensified a much older race-consciousness. Heavy will be the
responsibility of those within the Empire who meet her with an
uncompromising assertion of the white man's superior rights and
interests as the _suprema lex et suprema salus Imperii_.

It is not, indeed, the future of India alone that is at stake. If we
look beyond India to the rest of the great continent of Asia, and beyond
our own Empire to the great American Republic with which we have so much
in common, recognition or denial of racial equality lies close beneath
the surface where burning questions still threaten the world with war.
The British people have made in India the first bold attempt to rob the
issue of its worst sting. If we persevere and can succeed we shall not
only strengthen immeasurably the foundations of our far-flung Empire,
but we shall enable it to play an immeasurably useful part in averting a
world danger. For the British Empire with its Western and Eastern
aspects, with its great Western democracies and its oriental peoples,
more advanced than and as gifted as any Asiatic people, seems to-day to
be providentially so constituted that it may act more effectively than
any other power as a link between the great Asiatic and the great
Western powers of Europe and A