For two or three generations the ordinary English Liberal postponed any decision on Indian politics, because he believed that we were educating the inhabitants for self-government, and that in due time they would all have a vote for an Indian parliament.

Now he is becoming aware that there are many races in India, and that some of the most important differences between those races among themselves, and between any of them and ourselves, are not such as can be obliterated by education.

He is told by men whom he respects that this fact makes it certain that the representative system which is suitable for England will never be suitable for India, and therefore he remains uneasily responsible for 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.