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