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 America, 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