the permanent autocratic government of three hundred million people,
remembering from time to time that some of those people or their
neighbours may have much more definite political ideas than his own, and
that he ultimately may have to fight for a power which he hardly desires
to retain.

Meanwhile, the existence of the Indian problem loosens half-consciously
his grip upon democratic principle in matters nearer home. Newspapers
and magazines and steamships are constantly making India more real to
him, and the conviction of a Liberal that Polish immigrants or London
'latch-key' lodgers ought to have a vote is less decided than it would
have been if he had not acquiesced in the decision that Rajputs, and
Bengalis, and Parsees should be refused it.

Practical politicians cannot, it is true, be expected to stop in the
middle of a campaign merely because they have an uncomfortable feeling
that the rules of the game require re-stating and possibly re-casting.
But the winning or losing of elections does not exhaust the whole
political duty of a nation, and perhaps there never has been a time in
which the disinterested examination of political principles has been
more urgently required. Hitherto the main stimulus to political
speculation has been provided by wars and revolutions, by the fight of
the Greek States against the Persians, and their disastrous struggle for
supremacy among themselves, or by the wars of religion in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and the American and French Revolutions in
the eighteenth century. The outstanding social events in Europe in our
own time have, however, been so far the failures rather than the
successes of great movements; the apparent wasting of devotion and
courage in Russia, owing to the deep-seated intellectual divisions among
the reformers, and the military advantage which modern weapons and means