It is just there that Mr. Gandhi strikes a responsive chord in many thoughtful Indians who repudiate him as a political leader.  For their faith in either the material or moral superiority of Western civilisation is, one must admit, far less general and deep-seated than it still was only a generation ago.  The emergence of Japan and her sweeping victories on land and water over the great European power that tried to humble her dealt the first heavy blow at their belief in the material superiority of the West.  Just as severely shaken is their belief in its moral superiority, even with many whose loyalty to the British cause never wavered during the Great War and who still pride themselves on India’s share in its final victory, when they see how the world of Western civilisation has been reft asunder by four years of frightful conflict which drenched all Europe with blood and left half of it at least plunged in black ruin.  We have preached to Indians, not untruly, but with an insistence that seems to them now more than ever to savour of self-righteousness, that our superior civilisation redeemed them out of the anarchy and strife which devastated India before British rule brought her peace and order and justice.  Now they ask themselves how it comes, then, that the Western civilisation which they are told to thank for their own salvation has not saved Europe itself from the chaos which has overtaken it to-day.  Still more searching are the questions that they ask when they see the great powers that have been fortunate enough to emerge victorious from the struggle still postulating the superiority of Western civilisation as sufficient grounds for denying to other races who do not share it or have only recently come under its influence the right to equal treatment.  Their gorge rises most of all when Western civilisation actually bases its claim to superiority not on ethical but on racial grounds, and nations that profess to be followers of Christ, Himself of Asiatic birth and descent, carve out the world which He died to save—­not for the benefit of one race alone—­into water-tight compartments, from some of which the Asiatic is to be excluded by a colour-bar, but to all of which the white man is to have access for such purposes and by such means as he himself deems right.  If the British Empire stands for a merely racial civilisation of which the benefit is reserved for the white man only, what, they ask, is the value of a promise of partnership in it when Indians are ipso facto racially disqualified from partnership?

There lies the rub.  The argument may have been stated in an extreme form, but it has to be faced, for it goes home to many Indians who would not be moved by Mr. Gandhi’s cruder abuse of a “Satanic” civilisation.  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