Now I have talked, I suppose, with many scores of people about the future of India, and I have never yet met anyone, Indian or British, who thought it desirable that the British should evacuate India at once.  And I have never yet met anyone who did not think that ultimately the British must let the Indian nations control their own destinies.  There are really not two opposite opinions about the destiny of India, but only differences of opinion as to the length of time in which that destiny is to be achieved.  Many Indians think (and I agree with them) that India might be a confederation of sovereign states in close alliance with the British Empire and its allies within the space of fifty years or so.  The opposite extreme was expressed by an old weary Indian administrator who told me, “Perhaps they may begin to be capable of self-government in four or five hundred years.”  These are the extreme Liberal and the extreme Tory positions in this question.  It is a choice between decades and centuries.  There is no denial of the inevitability of ultimate restoration.  No one of any experience believes the British administration in India is an eternal institution.

There is a great deal of cant in this matter in Great Britain.  Genteel English people with relations in the Indian Civil Service and habits of self-delusion, believe that Indians are “grateful” for British rule.  The sort of “patriotic” self-flattery that prevailed in the Victorian age, and which is so closely akin to contemporary German follies, fostered and cultivated this sweet delusion.  There are, no doubt, old ladies in Germany to-day who believe that Belgium will presently be “grateful” for the present German administration.  Let us clear our minds of such cant.  As a matter of fact no Indians really like British rule or think of it as anything better than a necessary, temporary evil.  Let me put the parallel case to an Englishman or a Frenchman.  Through various political ineptitudes our country has, we will suppose, fallen under the rule of the Chinese.  They administer it, we will further assume, with an efficiency and honesty unparalleled in the bad old times of our lawyer politicians.  They do not admit us to the higher branches of the administration; they go about our country wearing a strange costume, professing a strange religion—­which implies that ours is wrong—­speaking an unfamiliar tongue.  They control our financial system and our economic development—­on Chinese lines of the highest merit.  They take the utmost care of our Gothic cathedrals for us.  They put our dearest racial possessions into museums and admire them very much indeed.  They teach our young men to fly kites and eat bird’s nest soup.  They do all that a well-bred people can do to conceal their habit and persuasion of a racial superiority.  But they keep up their “prestige.” ...  You know, we shouldn’t love them.  It really isn’t a question of whether they rule well or ill, but that the position is against certain