ntlemen, I should very badly repay your kindness in asking me to
come among you to-night, if I were to attempt for a minute to analyse
or to prove all the conditions that have led to this state of things.
It would need hours and days. This is not, I think, the occasion, nor
the moment. Our first duty--the first duty of any Government--is to
keep order. But just remember this. It would be idle to deny, and I am
not sure that any of you gentlemen would deny, that there is at this
moment, and there has been for some little time past, and very likely
there will be for some time to come, a living movement in the mind of
the peoples for whom you are responsible. A living movement, and a
movement for what? A movement for objects which we ourselves have all
taught them to think desirable objects. And unless we somehow or other
can reconcile order with satisfaction of those ideas and aspirations,
gentlemen, the fault will not be theirs. It will be ours. It will mark
the breakdown of what has never yet broken down in any part of the
world--the breakdown of British statesmanship. That is what it will
do. Now I do not believe anybody--either in this room or out of this
room--believes that we can now enter upon an era of pure repression.
You cannot enter at this date and with English public opinion, mind
you, watching you, upon an era of pure repression, and I do not
believe really that anybody desires any such thing. I do not believe
so. Gentlemen, we have seen attempts, in the lifetime of some of us
here to-night, attempts in Continental Europe, to govern by pure
repression. Has one of them really succeeded? They have all failed.
There may be now and again a spurious semblance of success, but in
truth they have all failed. Whether we with our enormous power and
resolution should fail, I do not know. But I do not believe anybody
in this room representing so powerfully as you do dominant sentiments
that are not always felt in England--that in this room there is
anybody who is for an era of pure repression. Gentlemen, I would just
digress for a moment if I am not tiring you. ("Go on,") About the same
time as the transfer, about fifty years ago, of the Government of
India from the old East India Company to the Crown, another very
important step was taken, a step which I have often thought since
I have been concerned with the Government of India was far more
momentous, one almost deeper than the transfer to the Crown. And what
do you th