because it alone is developed to such a point that the problem is inevitably raised.  Whatever else may happen, the war must necessarily bring a crisis in the history of the British Empire.  On a vastly greater scale the situation of 1763 is being reproduced.  Now, as then, the Empire will emerge from a war for existence, in which mother and daughter lands alike have shared.  Now, as then, the strain and pressure of the war will have brought to light deficiencies in the system of the Empire.  Now, as then, the most patent of these deficiencies will be the fact that, generous as the self-governing powers of the great Dominions have been, they still have limits; and the irresistible tendency of self-government to work towards its own fulfilment will once more show itself.  For there are two spheres in which even the most fully self-governing of the empire-nations have no effective control:  they do not share in the determination of foreign policy, and they do not share in the direction of imperial defence.  The responsibility for foreign policy, and the responsibility, and with it almost the whole burden, of organising imperial defence, have hitherto rested solely with Britain.  Until the Great War, foreign policy seemed to be a matter of purely European interest, not directly concerning the great Dominions; nor did the problems of imperial defence appear very pressing or urgent.  But now all have realised that not merely their interests, but their very existence, may depend upon the wise conduct of foreign relations; and now all have contributed the whole available strength of their manhood to support a struggle in whose direction they have had no effective share.  These things must henceforth be altered; and they can be altered only in one or other of three ways.  Either the great Dominions will become independent states, as the American colonies did, and pursue a foreign policy and maintain a system of defence of their own; or the Empire must reshape itself as a sort of permanent offensive and defensive alliance, whose external policy and modes of defence will be arranged by agreement; or some mode of common management of these and other questions must be devised.  The first of these solutions is unlikely to be adopted, not only because the component members of the Empire are conscious of their individual weakness, but still more because the memory of the ordeal through which all have passed must form an indissoluble bond.  Yet rashness or high-handedness in the treatment of the great issue might lead even to this unlikely result.  If either of the other two solutions is adopted, the question will at once arise of the place to be occupied, in the league or in the reorganised super-state, of all those innumerable sections of the Empire which do not yet enjoy, and some of which may never enjoy, the full privileges of self-government; and above all, the place to be taken by the vast dominion of India, which though it is not, and may not for a long time