England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges of British citizenship have been placed by the progress of events in a position of peculiar responsibility. The twentieth century finds us the centre of the widest experiment of self-government which the world has ever seen; for the principles of liberty, first tested in this island, have approved themselves on the soil of North America, Australasia, and South Africa. It finds us also responsible for the government and for the training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth, about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that internationalizing of the world, to which reference has already been made. It represents the control of law and organized government over the blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of this control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes selfish. But 'the situation of man', as Burke finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is the preceptor of his duty'. The perseverance of the British character, its habit of concentration on the work that lies to hand, and the influence of our traditional social and political ideals, have slowly brought us to a deeper insight, till to-day the Commonwealth is becoming alive to the real nature of its task--the extension and consolidation of liberty. If it has thus taken up, in part, the work of the mediaeval Empire and has had a measure of success where the other failed, it is because of the character of its individual citizens, because despite constant and heart-breaking failures in knowledge and imagination, we are a people who, in the words of a stern, if friendly, critic, 'with great self-assertion and a bull-dog kind of courage, have yet a singular amount of gentleness and tenderness'.[66] * * * * *