live to see it,—when it will be considered unwise to govern any country or any people without consulting the people's wishes, without some kind of representative institutions? Men in power at the present day will laugh at the idea,—but nevertheless the wave of liberal opinions in England is advancing with a rapidity which is remarkable and significant. Measures which were considered radical fifteen years ago are now considered practicable or even not advanced enough, and conservatives in the present day are, it is a well known fact, purloining and adopting one by one those measures which liberals twenty years ago could only broach as ideas. The conservatives cannot help themselves,—they must either do this or go to the wall,—for the nation wants these measures. And in no respect is the advance of these liberal ideas more conspicuous than in respect of the relation of England with her dependencies. Many of us who are young and even many of us now in their middle age will probably live to see the day when the people of India will have a constitutional means of expressing their views on the administration of their country, when their views will to a large extent shape that administration, and when their hands will to a great extent practically manage that administration. The divine right of conquerors will be as obsolete a phrase in the political dictionary of the twentieth century as the divine right of kings is in the nineteenth, and the people of India will be proud of their connection with England, as the sons of Englishmen in Australia or Canada.
I had visited Cambridge during my last sojourn in
