That Indian co-operation will not fail us if we persevere in ensuing it, not only in the letter of the great Statute of 1919 but in the spirit of the King-Emperor’s messages to his Indian people, is an assumption which there is much to justify us in making.  But, for the present, it cannot be much more than an assumption.  In support of it we can rely not only, one may hope, on the continued support of large if inarticulate masses, and of the old conservative interests that have been content to stand aloof from all political agitation, but also on the fine rally of the great majority of the politically minded classes in India whom intellectual partnership has to some extent prepared for political partnership.  They still form, unfortunately, but a very small numerical minority.  But their influence cannot be measured by mere numbers.  If it grew in the past even when we were showing more impatience than sympathy with its aspirations, it may be expected to grow still more rapidly in future under new conditions that give it more recognition and more encouragement.  In all countries the impulse to progress has always proceeded from small minorities, and in India the small but active minority from which it has proceeded has been essentially of our own making, since it owes to us all its conceptions of political freedom and national unity and the very language in which it has learnt to express them.  Out of the ancient world of India we have raised a new Indian middle class, with one foot perhaps still lingering in Indian civilisation but with the other certainly planted in Western civilisation.  It has long claimed that its leaders were fit to be the leaders of a nation.  We have now conceded that claim.  It rests with those leaders to make it good.  They have already given proofs of both political wisdom and courage; for it is they who bore the brunt of the battle against the wreckers of the new Constitution during the elections and won it, and it is they who, forming the majority in the new assemblies, have shown sagacity and moderation in the exercise of their new rights and the discharge of their new responsibilities as the means to closer co-operation between Indians and British.  But the opposing forces arrayed against co-operation, as I have shown in the previous chapter, are still formidable.  They assume many different shapes.  They exploit many different forms of popular discontent.  If they have failed to lay hold of the better and more educated classes, they have captured in some parts at least the masses that were never before anti-British.  They have inflamed the racial hatred which untoward incidents helped to stir up.  In Mr. Gandhi they have found a strangely potent leader who appeals to the religious emotions of both Hindus and Mahomedans to shake themselves free from the degrading yoke of an alien civilisation, and implores them to return to the ancient and better ways of India’s own civilisation.