Or picture, if you can, young India, pouring out her life-blood with pride and ready sacrifice, in France, in Egypt, and in Mesopotamia, for the "British Raj." The most moving scene in the history of the British Commons was on that evening in 1915, when the princes of India stood amidst the representatives of the people of the homelands and paid their homage.
How much such things mean will depend on the vision of those who hear them; but they have in them the stuff that holds the future.
This ghastly war, not of our choosing, has transferred the seats of learning for young Britain from their peaceful sites to the battlefield. If the object of education is the cultivation of the power of thought and observation, the kindling of imagination, and the extension of knowledge; then "over there" is a University set in full array, with ghostly as well as human tutors, a curriculum without precedent, and such a body of undergraduates as Cambridge or Oxford might covet.
It is not for nothing, as regards the Empire, that your sons, the children of the East End, and the boys of Canada, Australasia, and South Africa, are meeting and mingling with Gurkha and Sikh, and with each other. They are sharing a common discipline, a common adventure, making sacrifice together. They are seeing each other with eyes from which the scales are falling, and knowledge and understanding are growing out of their contact. The farthest reaches of Empire have been brought nearer to the Empire's heart by this brotherhood in arms, and the barriers between classes have been lowered until a man can step across them without climbing. The distance between East and West has been immeasurably shortened, whether we are thinking in terms of London, or of the Empire.
In our consideration of this whole subject we are to take the Christian standpoint. To us, the words "Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven," on Divine lips were more than a pious wish. They were a great intention, the expression of age-long purpose. We believe that the gains of the centuries—the harvest of the past which is worth conserving—have been secured by moral and spiritual conquest, rather than by military or political achievement. There may be elements in our present forms of unity which we may well allow to go by the board. The things that make for permanence will abide not only with an enlightened statesmanship, but with a growing understanding, an ever broadening interpretation of Christian teaching about
The Kingdom of God on earth,
The Universal Fatherhood of God, and
The brotherhood of man,
leading the nation to see that the knowledge of God and of His Christ is the rightful inheritance of every son of the Empire.
As these great ideals of social life have been interpreted in the life of either sovereign peoples or subject peoples, so, we believe, and only so, have bonds been forged that can be trusted to stand the strain which time and changing condition and circumstances impose.