It is characteristic of British politics that they are never merely or fully logical, and that even when political doctrines seem to enjoy the most complete ascendancy, they are never put into effect without qualifications or exceptions.  The exceptions already named to the establishment of full self-government were due to many and varying causes.  In the first place, there was in most of these cases no effective demand for full self-government; and it may safely be asserted that any community in which there is no demand for self-governing institutions is probably not in a condition to work them with effect.  Some of these possessions were purely military posts, like Gibraltar and Aden, and were necessarily administered as such.  Others were too small and weak to dream of assuming the full privileges.  But in the majority of cases one outstanding common feature will appear on closer analysis.  Nearly all these territories were tropical or semi-tropical lands, whose British inhabitants were not permanent settlers, but were present solely for the purposes of trade or other exploitation, while the bulk of the population consisted of backward peoples, whose traditions and civilisation rendered their effective participation in public affairs quite impracticable.  In such cases, to have given full political power to the small and generally shifting minority of white men would have been to give scope to many evils; and to have enfranchised, on a mere theory, the mass of the population would have been to produce still worse results.  It would have sentenced these communities to the sort of fate which has befallen the beautiful island of Hayti, where the self-government of a population of emancipated negro slaves has brought nothing but anarchy and degradation.  In such conditions the steady Reign of Law is the greatest boon that can be given to white settlers and coloured subjects alike; and the final authority is rightly retained by the home government, inspired, as British opinion has long required that it should be, by the principle that the rights of the backward peoples must be safeguarded.  Under this system, both law and a real degree of liberty are made possible; whereas under a doctrinaire application of the theory of self-government, both would vanish.

But there remains the vast dominion of India, which falls neither into the one category nor into the other.  Though there are many primitive and backward elements among its vast population, there are also peoples and castes whose members are intellectually capable of meeting on equal terms the members of any of the ruling races of the West.  Yet during this age, when self-government on the amplest scale was being extended to the chief regions of the British Empire, India, the greatest dominion of them all, did not obtain the gift of representative institutions even on the most modest scale.  Why was this?