merica, between the races and the
civilisations which they represent.

We may restore in India, and through India all over Asia, a new and
reinvigorated faith in the British Empire's mission, if we do not shrink
from putting into practice in our dealings with her the principle of
partnership in rights and duties on which our Imperial Commonwealth of
Nations has been built up. We have enshrined that principle in the new
constitutional charter we have of our own free will bestowed upon India.
But if we pay only half-hearted homage to it, and our own people,
whether at home, or in other parts of the Empire, or in India itself,
whether statesmen or soldiers, or administrators or merchants, succumb
to the temptation of trying still to combine with it in practice a
disingenuous survival of the old idea of domination of one race over
another, after we have so solemnly repudiated it, we shall drift the
more rapidly and disastrously on to the quicksands of racial strife and
chronic disorder which, though they may fail to overthrow British rule,
would steadily weaken, and perhaps paralyse, its power for good that is
after all its one enduring justification. If, on the other hand, we
fulfil that which we have always recognised, and to-day with renewed
clearness of vision, to be our mission in India, by reconciling the best
elements in Indian civilisation and our own, and if we can convert our
commonwealth of free British nations into a commonwealth of free Western
and Eastern nations on a basis of real equality, we shall set an example
of no less value to others than will be to ourselves our own
achievement. The failure in its latest and most crucial stage of the
great adventure upon which we entered three centuries ago, not, let us
for the moment assume, through lack of Indian co-operation or of the
desire on the part of the British in India to co-operate with Indians,
but through the inability of the British people as a whole and
throughout the Empire to rise to so great an opportunity, would react
far beyond the confines of India. The tide of racial hatred which may
yet be stemmed would rise and perhaps not only undermine the present
fabric of our Empire, but strew East and West with the wreckage of
disappointed hopes and embittered animosities.

There are some who hold that the British Empire has made its last if
most glorious effort in the Great War, and that in it Western
civilisation proclaimed itself bankrupt and committe