ons 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 ample