As for the Crown Colonies and India, the Dominions must share our burden.  It is objected, both here and in India, that life in the Dominions is a very inadequate education for the sympathetic handling of alien races and customs.  So is life in many parts of this island.  The fact is that the process of learning to govern these alien peoples is the best education in the world.  The Indian Civil Service is a great College, and it governs India.  I can speak to this point, for I have lived there and seen it at work.  If India were really governed by the ideas of the young novices who go out there fresh from their examinations, she would be a distressful country.  But the novice is taken in hand at once by the older members of the service; he works under the eye of the Collector and the Assistant Collector; they shoulder him and instruct him as tame elephants shoulder and instruct the wild; they are kind to him, and he lives in their company while his prejudices and follies peel off him; so that within a few years he becomes a tolerant, wise, and devoted civil servant, who speaks the language of the College and is proud to belong to it.  The success of the Government of India is not to be credited to the classes from which the Civil Service is recruited, but to the discipline of the Service itself, a Service so high in tradition and so free from corruption that advancement in it is to be gained only by intelligence and sympathy.  What I am saying is that I can imagine no finer raw material for the political discipline of the Indian Civil Service than some of the generous and clean-run spirits who have come from the Dominions to help in this war.  They could be introduced to a share of our responsibilities without impeding or retarding the movement to give to selected natives of India a larger share in the government of their country.

But the war is not over, so I return to the main issue—­the conflict between the English idea and the German idea of world government.  It is not an accident, as Baron von Huegel remarks in his book on The German Soul, that the chief colonizing nation of the world should be a nation without a national army.  We have depended enormously in the past on the initiative and virtue of the individual adventurer; if our adventurers were to fail us, which is not likely, or if the State were to supersede them, and attempt to do their work, which is not conceivable, our political power and influence would vanish with them.  The world might perhaps be well ordered, but there would be no freedom, and no fun.  The beauty of the adventurer is that he is practically invincible.  He does not wait for orders.  Under the most perfect police system that Germany could devise, he would be up and at it again.  We are not so numerous as the Germans, but there are enough and to spare of us to make German government impossible in any place where we pitch our tents.  We are practised hands at upsetting governments.  Our political system is a training school for rebels.