India, Old and New eBook

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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 committed suicide. That cannot be. The cause for which the British people fought and made such appalling sacrifices was not unworthy of them or of our civilisation. Heavy clouds hang over the future and obscure the paths of the nations. But in India, where East and West meet as nowhere else, Britain has lighted a beacon which, if she keep it burning, will show to both the way of escape from a more disastrous conflict than that from which the West has just emerged battered and bleeding—a conflict not between nations but between races.