ON IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP. 429 



If this movement should ever prevail, our \vori< in India would be largely 

 undone, and her Imperial value greatly impaired. Against such a 

 calamity there are several lines of insurance, but the extension of 

 Imperial Citizenship is certainly not one of tlie least promising. 



Turn ne.Kt to the Moslems of India. Among them, as among their 

 co-i'eligionists in Egypt, Arabia, and Persia, there is a definite move- 

 ment towards the solidarity of Islam and the weakening of any temporal 

 allegiance to non-Islamic powers. It has taken various forms, and 

 to-day we know it best in India under the guise of the Caliphate agita- 

 tion, the embers of which may flare out again with the recent successes 

 of Turkey in Asia Minor. Anti-Christian bigotry is never wholly absent 

 from it, but so far as India is concerned its underlying motive is, and 

 has always been, a craving for some wider nationality than a country 

 in which Hinduism is in the ascendant both numerical and intellectual. 

 While, therefore, there can be no rest till the Mahomedans of India 

 are persuaded that it is their country rather than some vague pan- 

 Islamic paradise, it will ease the situation enormously in the meantime 

 if we can offer them that larger horizon for which they long, not in a 

 visionary world-empire of Islam, but in the real world-empire of which 

 they are already members. 



The extension of Imperial Citizenship to India is thus more than a 

 step in social progress; it is a paramount political necessity. At this 

 crisis of its fate India needs guidance and inspiration — the guidance of 

 an ideal which will outshine the will-o'-the-wisps now hovering near 

 its path, the inspiration of an emotion nobler and more humane tlian 

 some of those which now distort its vision. We can provide the ideal 

 and the emotion in the conception on which this paper is based, if we 

 can offer the status in which they are generated. 



The difficulties are far from negligible, and it would be foolish to 

 underrate them. It cannot be pretended that India as a nation has 

 attained the qualifications, if we enumerated them fairly, which are 

 required for full Imperial Citizenship. A large and growing number of 

 individual Indians are fully qualified, but it is not with them that our 

 Dominions or most of our Colonies are familiar. The emigrants, espe- 

 cially to our tropical and sub-tropical possessions, are largely drawn 

 from lower and less desirable classes, and there are complaints of their 

 inability to conform to sanitary and other standards which the local 

 authorities find it necessary to enforce. Behind these obstacles there 

 generally lie the clash of economic interests and the determination of a 

 sparse white population not to be swamped by coloured settlers. 



What, then, is to be done? While we recognise valid objections to 

 the indiscriminate extension of the privileges of citizenship to Indians, 

 how are we to bring those objections home and to satisfy India that 

 we are not actuated by selfish prejudice or racial hauteur? While we 

 assert our willingness to open the doors of our citizenship to India at 

 the earliest possible moment, how are we to persuade India of our 

 sincerity and to stay her impatience and her suspicions? These are 

 the pressing questions before you and me to-day ; and by way of con- 

 tribution to answering them I suggest (at least, as a basis for discussion) 

 that our course is a threefold one. 



