When to all this we connect the fact that from 75,000 to 100,000 British people find well paid employment in carrying on the government, defence and industrial development of the country we begin to understand the vast range of national interests involved in our retaining possession of India. The estimate that the people of the United Kingdom draw from India sixty or seventy millions sterling every year in direct income is probably a moderate one. Directly then Britain's stake in India is enormous. Indirectly our possession of the country would probably determine the drift of the commerce of the vast regions still further East. Nor is it the United Kingdom alone which is concerned. The present and prospective interest of the Australasian colonies in India are also great, not only for the military reasons which have been mentioned, but in view of the growing trade relations. India reduced to anarchy by the withdrawal of British rule, or India governed by Russia, would mean a serious blow {247} to Australasian trade, present and prospective. It might easily mean exclusion from all the markets of the East. South Africa, which owed its earliest development to the fact that it was the stopping place on the road to India, still owes much of its importance to the same cause. The interest of Canada in India is more remote, but now that Canadian steamship lines are on the Pacific, with their terminus at Hong Kong, Britain's position in the East has a new interest for the Dominion. But every British colony great and small is directly and deeply interested in the maintenance of the power of the Empire, and if the continued power of the Empire involves, as it seems to do, the retention and government of India, the colonies should not shrink from sharing that responsibility. Professor Seeley has proved with conclusive clearness that the government of India has had very little effect upon the domestic politics of England; there is no reason to think that it would have more upon the domestic politics of the Empire. The political difficulty about India's relation to a united Empire is, however, felt very widely. It is one of the first which occurs to the minds of most men when they turn their attention to the question, as I have found during public discussion in many parts of the Empire. Nor is this to be wondered at. That a country enjoying popular representative institutions should rule as an imperial power over some hundreds {248} of millions of people without representation in their own government is an extraordinary anomaly. Men's minds have, however, become accustomed to it by long usage, and the fact is accepted almost without remark. But when a proposal is made to re-construct the national organism on what is claimed to be a logical basis, the incompatibility between our popular system of government, and the system which we apply to India at once re-appears.