NATIONALISM ITS ORIGIN, HISTORY, AND IDEALS - 1920 - PREFATORY NOTES ONHIMPERIALISM AND NATIONALISM - IT is my good fortune to have a friend. Profoundly learned in the earliest mythologies, he lives for the more part in that remote and unfrequented darkness which we conveniently designate pre-history. The other day he came near to the haunts of modern men, and said to me something like this At first the Empire was a mere supremacy. This form of Imperialism became obsolete,-supremacy was given, not a moral content, but a moral objective. Of this half-moralised conception, Lord Milner is the principal representative. It marked a step in the right direction, but it is not sufficient unto. the needs of to-day, for it can hardly consist with the newly-emergent claims of Nationality. We must make it quite clear, in words and deeds, that the norm, the telos, of the Empire is something more than a benevolent supremacy,-is a vital synthesis of free peoples, an integration of Nationalities in and through Freedom. If we do not do this at once, we shall prepare for ourselves much trouble. I listened and I agreed. Years ago the new Imperialism which my friend desiderates had been the burden of an evenings talk with John MacNeill, and I had heard him say, We will listen to you we will not listen to any English politician. I had resumed the story in. many a letter to another Irishman,-in letters which became unavailingly known in Downing Street. Whispers from a new life in West Africa had reached me. I had listened to Eastern men while they exhibited to me the difference between the England that spoke through Whitehall and the England they had been taught to trust. I had been told of a continent in mourning when Tilak was imprisoned and ablaze with bonfires when he was released. I knew of disappointment in Burma, of resentment in Ceylon, of smothered dislike in Egypt. What could I do but agree with my friend He had told the truth. Turning an occasional eye from let us say Attys to Tilak, he had discerned the Empires vital need. Now the opportunity has come to me to write a few words prefatory to this book on Indian Nationalism. My task is an easy one. I have to do little more than emphasise the large conception towards which the authors have worked. That conception makes the book much more than a plea for Indian Nationalism. It is virtually a plea for a new Imperialism, and it marks a new stage in the development of our doctrine of the Empire...