The experiment can only succeed if it secures the steadfast and hearty extension to new purposes of the co-operation between British and Indians to which the British connection with India has owed from the very beginning, as I have tried to show, its chief strength and its best results. One may feel confident that amongst the British in India there will be few to deny their co-operation, though scepticism and prejudice may die hard and social relations may prove even harder to harmonise than political relations. The new Constitution was inaugurated under Lord Chelmsford's Viceroyalty. If he perhaps failed, especially at certain gravely critical moments, to rise above a somewhat narrow and unimaginative conception of his functions as the supreme depositary of British authority in India, and was too apt to regard himself always as merely primus inter pares in a governing body, peculiarly liable from its constitution to hesitate and procrastinate even in emergencies requiring prompt decision, Lord Chelmsford was as upright, honourable, and courageous an English gentleman as this country has ever sent out as Viceroy, and India will always gratefully associate his name with the reforms which have opened up a new era in her history. His place has now been taken by another Viceroy, Lord Reading, whose appointment at a time when so many Indians were smarting under a deep sense of injustice has been all the more heartily welcomed as, apart from many other qualifications, he went out to India with the special prestige of a great justiciary who had exchanged for the Viceroyalty the exalted post of Lord Chief Justice of England. Lord Reading's own liberalism is a sufficient guarantee that he will apply himself with all his approved ability to the carrying out of the new reforms. But, if anything more had been needed, the revised Instrument of Instructions under Royal Sign Manual which he took out with him for his guidance prescribed both for the Government of India and for the Provincial Governments the utmost restraint, "unless grave reason to the contrary appears," in any exercise of the emergency powers still vested in them in opposition to the policy and wishes of the Indian representative assemblies. "For, above all things," His Majesty concluded, "it is Our will and pleasure that the plans laid by Our Parliament for the progressive realisation of responsible government in British India may come to fruition, to the end that British India may attain its due place among Our Dominions."
That in carrying out those instructions Lord Reading will be able to rely on the full support of the British members of his own Executive Council and of the Provincial Governments the most practical proof has been already given in the wise and conciliatory attitude displayed by them during the first session of the new Legislatures in Delhi and in the Provinces, in marked contrast to the sense of impregnable authority too often made manifest when autocratic power was still entrenched behind official majorities voting to order. To the credit of the public services, and not least of the Indian Civil Service, I should add that, if I may venture to judge by the great majority of those I know best, there is now a genuine desire to make the reforms a success, however apprehensive some of them may have formerly been. The change unquestionably often involves considerable sacrifices of power, and even sometimes power for good, as well as of old traditions and prejudices, and such sacrifices come hardest to those whose habits of life and mind are already set, but they are worth making. It is far easier for the younger men who have more recently joined to realise that their opportunities of service to India and to the Empire will, if anything, be greater than before, though they will call for somewhat different qualities, as their influence will now depend more upon capacity to persuade than to give orders. To the non-official British communities the European-elected members of the new Assemblies have already given an admirable lead by the cordiality of their personal relations with their Indian colleagues, as well as by such public manifestations of goodwill and sound judgment as their unanimous vote in support of the Indian resolution on Amritsar in the Legislative Assembly. One of the greatest obstacles to fruitful co-operation is racial aloofness, even amongst the best-disposed Indians and Europeans, and every Englishman can on his own account and within his own sphere do something to overcome it.
The visit of the Duke of Connaught last winter to India for the express purpose of representing the King-Emperor at the opening of the new Councils in the three great Presidencies, and of delivering a Royal Message of unprecedented import to the new Indian Legislature in the Imperial capital, bore perhaps its happiest fruits in the personal appeal, prompted by his old love and knowledge of the Indian people, in which he sought to dispel "the shadow of Amritsar" that had "lengthened over the face of India," and did in fact do much to dispel it. The Prince of Wales is to follow this winter not only in the Duke's recent footsteps, but, as heir to the Throne, in the footsteps of his royal father and grandfather. Even if opinions are divided as to the political expediency of his visit before the clouds that still overhang the Indian horizon have been dispelled, we may rest assured that his personal qualities will win for him too the affection and reverence which the Indian people are traditionally and instinctively inclined to give to those whom the gods have invested with the heaven-born attributes of kingship.
That Indian co-operation will not fail us if we persevere in ensuing it, not only in the letter of the great Statute of 1919 but in the spirit of the King-Emperor's messages to his Indian people, is an assumption which there is much to justify us in making. But, for the present, it cannot be much more than an assumption. In support of it we can rely not only, one may hope, on the continued support of large if inarticulate masses, and of the old conservative interests that have been content to stand aloof from all political agitation, but also on the fine rally of the great majority of the politically minded classes in India whom intellectual partnership has to some extent prepared for political partnership. They still form, unfortunately, but a very small numerical minority. But their influence cannot be measured by mere numbers. If it grew in the past even when we were showing more impatience than sympathy with its aspirations, it may be expected to grow still more rapidly in future under new conditions that give it more recognition and more encouragement. In all countries the impulse to progress has always proceeded from small minorities, and in India the small but active minority from which it has proceeded has been essentially of our own making, since it owes to us all its conceptions of political freedom and national unity and the very language in which it has learnt to express them. Out of the ancient world of India we have raised a new Indian middle class, with one foot perhaps still lingering in Indian civilisation but with the other certainly planted in Western civilisation. It has long claimed that its leaders were fit to be the leaders of a nation. We have now conceded that claim. It rests with those leaders to make it good. They have already given proofs of both political wisdom and courage; for it is they who bore the brunt of the battle against the wreckers of the new Constitution during the elections and won it, and it is they who, forming the majority in the new assemblies, have shown sagacity and moderation in the exercise of their new rights and the discharge of their new responsibilities as the means to closer co-operation between Indians and British. But the opposing forces arrayed against co-operation, as I have shown in the previous chapter, are still formidable. They assume many different shapes. They exploit many different forms of popular discontent. If they have failed to lay hold of the better and more educated classes, they have captured in some parts at least the masses that were never before anti-British. They have inflamed the racial hatred which untoward incidents helped to stir up. In Mr. Gandhi they have found a strangely potent leader who appeals to the religious emotions of both Hindus and Mahomedans to shake themselves free from the degrading yoke of an alien civilisation, and implores them to return to the ancient and better ways of India's own civilisation.
It is just there that Mr. Gandhi strikes a responsive chord in many thoughtful Indians who repudiate him as a political leader. For their faith in either the material or moral superiority of Western civilisation is, one must admit, far less general and deep-seated than it still was only a generation ago. The emergence of Japan and her sweeping victories on land and water over the great European power that tried to humble her dealt the first heavy blow at their belief in the material superiority of the West. Just as severely shaken is their belief in its moral superiority, even with many whose loyalty to the British cause never wavered during the Great War and who still pride themselves on India's share in its final victory, when they see how the world of Western civilisation has been reft asunder by four years of frightful conflict which drenched all Europe with blood and left half of it at least plunged in black ruin. We have preached to Indians, not untruly, but with an insistence that seems to them now more than ever to savour of self-righteousness, that our superior civilisation redeemed them out of the anarchy and strife which devastated India before British rule brought her peace and order and justice. Now they ask themselves how it comes, then, that the Western civilisation which they are told to thank for their own salvation has not saved Europe itself from the chaos which has overtaken it to-day. Still more searching are the questions that they ask when they see the great powers that have been fortunate enough to emerge victorious from the struggle still postulating the superiority of Western civilisation as sufficient grounds for denying to other races who do not share it or have only recently come under its influence the right to equal treatment. Their gorge rises most of all when Western civilisation actually bases its claim to superiority not on ethical but on racial grounds, and nations that profess to be followers of Christ, Himself of Asiatic birth and descent, carve out the world which He died to save—not for the benefit of one race alone—into water-tight compartments, from some of which the Asiatic is to be excluded by a colour-bar, but to all of which the white man is to have access for such purposes and by such means as he himself deems right. If the British Empire stands for a merely racial civilisation of which the benefit is reserved for the white man only, what, they ask, is the value of a promise of partnership in it when Indians are ipso facto racially disqualified from partnership?
There lies the rub. The argument may have been stated in an extreme form, but it has to be faced, for it goes home to many Indians who would not be moved by Mr. Gandhi's cruder abuse of a "Satanic" civilisation. The overshadowing danger, and not in India alone, may be to-morrow, if not already to-day, that of a racial conflict. Is there any other way to avert it than by a frank recognition of racial equality in the sense of equality of rightful opportunity for both races, Asiatic and European? It is only in that sense that racial equality, like the equality already recognised of all men born to our common British nationhood, can have any meaning. For in the strict sense of the word no two men are born equal, either physically or intellectually, any more than there is complete equality in the family and social surroundings in which they are brought up. All that the citizens of the freest countries are entitled to claim is that there shall be no denial of right to them on the score of birth to equal opportunities for bringing their own individual qualities by their own effort to the largest possible fruition within the lawful limits prescribed to prevent injury being done to others or to the community at large. Does not the same hold good for nations and for races? The principle of equality thus understood must clearly prevail between Asiatics and Europeans in India, for all racial discrimination between them has long been ruled out by our own statutes, and now more than ever by a Constitution which calls India to partnership in the British Empire. It is, however, one thing to lay down a principle, and another to put it consistently into practice. There are questions in front of us in India which it will be difficult to solve if Indians and Englishmen approach them in a spirit of racial antagonism. They should not be insoluble if approached on the lines of equal opportunity for both races. Other and still more difficult questions are likely to produce divergencies of views and interests between India and other parts of the Empire, including the United Kingdom itself. The questions that affect the status and rights of Indians in the Dominions and Colonies go to the root of racial discrimination. When such questions arise their solution, in a sense that will give even the barest and most undeniably legitimate satisfaction to Indian views and Indian interests, will not be achieved merely through the co-operation of the Government of India, or of every Englishman, official or non-official, in India, however heartily these may identify themselves with Indian views and Indian interest. Their solution will rest with the British people all over the Empire. Will the British Government and the Dominion Governments and the free peoples behind them approach all questions in which India is concerned in the same spirit which they have already learnt to bring to bear upon questions in which not India but other partners of the Empire are concerned? Will they be prepared to approach them in the same spirit in which India was welcomed in times of stress and storm to the War Councils and Peace Councils of the Empire? That spirit was the spirit of equal partnership in a common danger, of co-operation on 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 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 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.