To this divided land the British rule has brought three inestimable boons: a firmly organised political unity; the impartial administration of a just and equal system of law, based on a codification of Indian usages; and the maintenance of a long, unbroken peace. To this may be added the introduction not only of the material boons of western civilisation--railways, roads, irrigation, postal facilities, and so forth--but of western learning. This has had to be conveyed through the vehicle of English, because it was impossible to create, in all the 38 vernaculars, a whole literature of modern knowledge. And the consequence is, that all the members of the large and growing class of University-trained students, whose existence for the first time creates an instructed public opinion in India, are able freely to communicate with one another, and to share a common body of ideas, to an extent that has never before been possible in all the earlier history of India. Out of all these causes, due to the British rule, there has begun to arise in this deeply divided land a sentiment of national unity, and an aspiration after self-government. This sentiment and this aspiration are in themselves excellent things; their danger is that they may lead to a demand for a too rapid advance. For national unity _cannot_ be created by merely asserting that it exists. It will not be fully established until the deeply-rooted differences which are only beginning to be obliterated have largely ceased to determine men's thoughts and actions, as they still do in India. And self-government, on the amplest scale of modern democracy, cannot be achieved until the traditionally ascendant classes, and the traditionally subject classes, have alike learned to recognise the equality of their rights before the law. But the foundations have been made of advance towards both of these aims; they are the result of British rule.