It is a great honour that it should fall to me to be the first Secretary of State to address this body of probationers and others.  Personally I am always delighted at any reason, good or bad, that brings me to Oxford.  A great deal of Cherwell water has flowed under Magdalen Bridge, since I was an undergraduate here, and I have a feeling of nostalgia, when I think of Oxford and come to Oxford.  The reminiscences of one’s younger days are apt to have in older times an ironical tinge, but that is not for any of you to-day to consider.  I am glad to know that of the fifty odd members of the Civil Service who are going out this autumn, not less than half are Oxford men, nearly all of them, Oxford bred, and even the three or four who are not Oxford bred, are practically, so far as can be, Oxford men.  Now I will go a little wider.  An Indian Minister is rather isolated in the public eye, amid the press and bustle of the political energies, perplexities, interests, and partisan passions that stir and concentrate attention on our own home affairs.  Yet let me assure you that there is no ordinary compensation for that isolation in the breast of an Indian Minister.  He finds the richest compensation in the enormous magnitude and endless variety of all the vast field of interests, present and still more future, that are committed to his temporary charge.  Though his charge may be temporary, I should think every Secretary of State remembers that even in that fugitive span he may either do some good or, if he is unhappy, he may do much harm.

This week London has been enormously excited by the Imperial Press Conference.  I was rather struck by the extraordinarily small attention, almost amounting to nothing, that was given to the Dominion that you here are concerned with.  No doubt an Imperial Conference raises one or two very delicate questions, as to whether common citizenship is to be observed, or whether the relations between India and the Colonies should remain what they are.  I am not going to expatiate upon that to-night, but it did occur to me in reading all these proceedings that the part of Hamlet was rather omitted, because India after all is the only real Empire.  You there have an immense Dominion, an almost countless population, governed by foreign rulers.  That is what constitutes an Empire.  I observed it all with a rather grim feeling in my mind, that, if anything goes wrong in India, the whole of what we are talking about now, the material and military conditions of the Empire as a whole, might be strangely altered and convulsed.  One of the happy qualities of youth—­and there is no pleasure greater than to see you in that blissful stage, for one who has passed beyond, long beyond it—­is not to be, I think I am right, in a hurry, not to be too anxious either for the present or future measure of the responsibilities of life and a career.  You will forgive me if I remind you of what I am sure you all know—­that the civil government of 230,000,000 persons in British