of organisation, and by a desire to retain and strengthen their best features.  The new attitude was perhaps to be seen at its best in the work of Mountstuart Elphinstone, a great administrator who was also a profound student of Indian history, and a very sympathetic observer and friend of Indian customs and modes of life.  But the same spirit was exemplified by the whole of the remarkable generation of statesmen of whom Elphinstone was one.  They established the view that it was the duty of the British power to reorganise India, indeed, but to reorganise it on lines in accordance with its own traditions.  Above all, the principle was in this generation very definitely established that India, like other great dependencies, must be administered in the interests of its own people, and not in the interests of the ruling race.  That seems to us to-day a platitude.  It would not have seemed a platitude in the eighteenth century.  It would not seem a platitude in modern Germany.  And it may safely be said that the enunciation of such a doctrine would have seemed merely absurd in any of the earlier historical empires.  In 1833 an official report laid before the British parliament contained these remarkable words:  ’It is recognised as an indisputable principle, that the interests of the Native Subjects are to be consulted in preference to those of Europeans, wherever the two come in competition.’  In all the records of imperialism it would be hard to find a parallel to this formal statement of policy by the supreme government of a ruling race.  When such a statement could be made, it is manifest that the meaning of the word Empire had undergone a remarkable transformation.  No one can read the history of British rule in India during this period without feeling that, in spite of occasional lapses, this was its real spirit.

But the most powerful constructive element in the shaping of the new imperial policy of Britain was the strength of the belief in the idea of self-government, as not only morally desirable but practically efficacious, which was to be perceived at work in the political circles of Britain during this age.  Self-government had throughout the modern age been a matter of habit and practice with the British peoples; now it became a matter of theory and belief.  And from this resulted a great change of attitude towards the problems of colonial administration.  The American problem in the eighteenth century had arisen ultimately out of the demand of the Americans for unqualified and responsible control over their own affairs:  the attitude of the Englishman in reply to this demand (though he never clearly analysed it) was, in effect, that self-government was a good and desirable thing, but that on the scale on which the Americans claimed it, it would be fatal to the unity of the Empire, and the unity of the Empire must come first.  Faced by similar problems in the nineteenth century, the Englishman’s response generally was that self-government