'As time passes it rather appears that we are in the hands of a Providence which is greater than all statesmanship, that this fabric so blindly piled up has a chance of becoming a part of the permanent edifice of civilization, and that the Indian achievement of England, as it is the strangest, may after all turn out to be the greatest; of all her achievements.'--Prof. J. R. Seeley. 'BUT above all, what is to be done with India'? With this question Mr. Goldwin Smith makes the relation of India to the Empire the crux of the Federation problem. To him the difficulty presented seems insoluble, chiefly because he believes that it would be impossible for a federation of democratic communities scattered over the globe to hold India, about which they know little, as a dependency. He even doubts, in his customary vein of pessimism, whether the fate of the Indian Empire is not already 'sealed by the progress of democracy in Britain.' So far from this last being the case it looks as if the English working man, who has annually more than £60,000,000 of trade staked on our hold on India, will be the last to weaken by his vote our position in the country or our grip on the waterways which lead to the East. Every second or third day's work of the Lancashire cotton-spinner is done for the Indian market, or for other Eastern {244} markets which we control on account of our position in India. In some large districts, such as that of Oldham, the proportion is three days' work out of four. And the Lancashire spinner is a keen political thinker, especially where his bread and butter are concerned. The industry of the city of Dundee depends almost entirely upon the supply of a single fibre from the valley of the Ganges. The Dundee jute-worker is a Radical, but he is not likely for that reason to forget that his daily wage depends on the hold which the Empire keeps upon Bengal. The purely trade relation of India to the United Kingdom was clearly put by Lord Dufferin in his address to the London Chamber of Commerce three years ago. He said:--