A great constitutional experiment, of which the expressed purpose is to bring a self-governing India into full and equal partnership with all other parts of the British Empire, has been courageously launched in deep waters still only partially explored, and it has resisted the first onslaught of a singular combination of malignant forces.  It is too early yet to speak with absolute assurance of its enduring success.  For success must depend upon many factors outside India as well as within.  All that can be said with confidence is that it has made a far more promising start than might have been looked for even in less unfavourable circumstances, and many Englishmen, and Indians also, who disliked and distrusted the reforms and would have preferred to stand in the old ways, are coming round to the belief that in their success lies the best and possibly the one real hope for the future.  Faith is naturally strongest in those who see in the experiment the natural and logical corollary of that even bolder experiment initiated nearly a hundred years ago when we introduced Western education in India.  That was the great turning-point in the history of British rule.  We had gone to India with no purpose of seeking dominion, but circumstances had forced dominion upon us.  With dominion had come the recognition of the great responsibilities which it involved, and having imposed upon India our own rule of law we imposed it also upon the agencies through which we then exercised dominion—­a self-denying ordinance for ourselves, for Indians a pledge of justice.  Dominion pure and simple made room for dominion regarded as a great trust.  But when we introduced Western education, we placed upon our trusteeship a new and wider construction.  We invited Indians to enter into intellectual partnership with our own civilisation, and for the purpose, admitted at the time but afterwards sometimes forgotten, of training them to a share in the responsibilities of Indian government and administration.  Many Englishmen from that moment contemplated intellectual partnership as the means to political partnership as the end.  That was indeed—­nearly a century before Mr. Asquith coined the phrase—­“the new angle of vision.”  The Mutiny distorted it, and it remained obscured when the great experiment was found to result, like all human experiments, in the production of some evil as well as of much good.  If the tares may have been sometimes more conspicuous than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them.  After many hesitations, and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that intellectual partnership however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partnership.  It became, indeed, impossible for us to refuse to do so without being untrue to the principles that had governed not only our own national evolution long before the war, but all our declared war aims and all our appeals, which never went unheeded, to Indian loyalty and co-operation during the war.