India, Old and New Part 10

The overshadowing danger, and not in India alone, may be to-morrow, if not already to-day, that of a racial conflict. Is there any other way to avert it than by a frank recognition of racial equality in the sense of equality of rightful opportunity for both races, Asiatic and European?

It is only in that sense that racial equality, like the equality already recognised of all men born to our common British nationhood, can have any meaning. For in the strict sense of the word no two men are born equal, either physically or intellectually, any more than there is complete equality in the family and social surroundings in which they are brought up. All that the citizens of the freest countries are ent.i.tled to claim is that there shall be no denial of right to them on the score of birth to equal opportunities for bringing their own individual qualities by their own effort to the largest possible fruition within the lawful limits prescribed to prevent injury being done to others or to the community at large. Does not the same hold good for nations and for races? The principle of equality thus understood must clearly prevail between Asiatics and Europeans in India, for all racial discrimination between them has long been ruled out by our own statutes, and now more than ever by a Const.i.tution which calls India to partnership in the British Empire. It is, however, one thing to lay down a principle, and another to put it consistently into practice. There are questions in front of us in India which it will be difficult to solve if Indians and Englishmen approach them in a spirit of racial antagonism. They should not be insoluble if approached on the lines of equal opportunity for both races. Other and still more difficult questions are likely to produce divergencies of views and interests between India and other parts of the Empire, including the United Kingdom itself. The questions that affect the status and rights of Indians in the Dominions and Colonies go to the root of racial discrimination. When such questions arise their solution, in a sense that will give even the barest and most undeniably legitimate satisfaction to Indian views and Indian interests, will not be achieved merely through the co-operation of the Government of India, or of every Englishman, official or non-official, in India, however heartily these may identify themselves with Indian views and Indian interest. Their solution will rest with the British people all over the Empire. Will the British Government and the Dominion Governments and the free peoples behind them approach all questions in which India is concerned in the same spirit which they have already learnt to bring to bear upon questions in which not India but other partners of the Empire are concerned? Will they be prepared to approach them in the same spirit in which India was welcomed in times of stress and storm to the War Councils and Peace Councils of the Empire? That spirit was the spirit of equal partnership in a common danger, of co-operation on equal terms in a common struggle, of equal opportunities of sacrifice in common. It was n.o.bly conceived in the womb of war. Will it have died with the war? Or will it survive and be extended to the discussion of Imperial questions already preoccupying the Indian mind in which compet.i.tive rather than common interests will have to be reckoned with--fiscal questions, questions relating to India's share in the defence of the Empire and of India's right to develop and control her own military and perhaps some day her own naval forces, questions affecting the common rights of British citizenship and the organic const.i.tution of the Empire?

Obviously in none of these questions can India expect her views and interests always to prevail. What she claims is that her voice be heard and listened to, not as that of an inferior supplicating for boons but with the deference and the desire for an agreed settlement by mutual consent to which the promise of equal partnership already, she holds, ent.i.tles her. That claim she will press, too, in questions affecting the status and rights of her people in the Dominions and in the Colonies with the insistence born of a new sense of nationhood which has intensified a much older race-consciousness. Heavy will be the responsibility of those within the Empire who meet her with an uncompromising a.s.sertion of the white man's superior rights and interests as the _suprema lex et suprema salus Imperii_.

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 const.i.tuted 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 const.i.tutional 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, succ.u.mb 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 a.s.sume, 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 throughout the Empire to rise to so great an opportunity, would react far beyond the confines of India. The tide of racial hatred which may yet be stemmed would rise and perhaps not only undermine the present fabric of our Empire, but strew East and West with the wreckage of disappointed hopes and embittered animosities.

There are some who hold that the British Empire has made its last if most glorious effort in the Great War, and that in it Western civilisation proclaimed itself bankrupt and committed suicide. That cannot be. The cause for which the British people fought and made such appalling sacrifices was not unworthy of them or of our civilisation.

Heavy clouds hang over the future and obscure the paths of the nations.

But in India, where East and West meet as nowhere else, Britain has lighted a beacon which, if she keep it burning, will show to both the way of escape from a more disastrous conflict than that from which the West has just emerged battered and bleeding--a conflict not between nations but between races.

THE END