bined with modesty, and equal rights and opportunities for all men and women. It puts at its true value the eminently plausible but almost certainly unscientific doctrine that mankind can solely or mainly be improved in the only manner that animals can-i.e., by careful selection or breeding. Above all, it paves the way for national and international concord and co-operation, and for a fair treatment of backward races, subject peoples, and small nations. In conclusion, the writer of this paper cannot refrain from expressing a fervent hope that the deliberations of this historic Congress may result in a better understanding and a higher appreciation of the different peoples on the globe, and may lead to the enactment of beneficent laws as well as to the formation of a powerful public opinion which shall promote this loftiest of objects.

Conclusions. The present writer has taken the liberty to put forward as his conclusions certain proposals implicit in the Questionnaire published by the Congress Executive. He has preserved the wording as far as possible :

1. (a) It is not legitimate to argue from differences in physical characteristics to differences in mental characteristics. (b) The physical and mental characteristics observable in a particular race are not (1) permanent, (2) modifiable only through ages of environmental pressure; but (3) marked changes in popular education, in public sentiment, and in environment generally, may, apart from intermarriage, materially transform physical and especially mental characteristics in a generation or two.

2. (a) The status of a race at any particular moment of time offers no index to its innate or inherited capacities. (b) It is of great importance in this respect to recognise that civilisations are meteoric in nature, bursting out of obscurity only to plunge back into it.

3. (a) We ought to combat the irreconcilable contentions prevalent among all the more important races of mankind that their customs, their civilisations, and their race are superior to those of other races. (b) In explanation of existing differences we would refer to special needs arising from peculiar geographical and economic conditions and to related divergences in national history; and, in explanation of the attitude assumed, we would refer to intimacy with one's own customs leading psychologically to a love of them and unfamiliarity with others' customs tending to lead psychologically to dislike and contempt of these latter.

4. (a) Differences in economic, hygienic, moral, and educational standards play a vital part in estranging races which come in contact with each other. (b) These differences, like social differences generally, are in substance almost certainly due to passing social conditions and not to innate racial characteristics, and the aim should be, as in social differences, to remove these rather than to accentuate them by regarding them as fixed.

5. (a) The deepest cause of race misunderstandings is perhaps the tacit assumption that the present characteristics of a race are the expression of fixed and permanent racial characteristics. (b) If so, anthropologists, sociologists, and scientific thinkers as a class, could powerfully assist the movement for a juster appreciation of races by persistently pointing out in their lectures and in their works the fundamental fallacy involved in taking a static instead

of a dynamic, a momentary instead of a historic, a local instead of a general, point of view of race characteristics. (c) And such dynamic teaching could be conveniently introduced into schools, more especially in the geography and history lessons; also into colleges for the training of teachers, diplomats, colonial administrators, and missionaries.

6. (a) The belief in racial superiority is largely due, as is suggested above, to unenlightened psychological repulsion and under-estimation of the dynamic or environmental factors; (b) there is no fair proof of some races being substantially superior to others in inborn capacity, and hence our moral standard need never be modified.

7. (A) (a) So far at least as intellectual and moral aptitudes are concerned, we ought to speak of civilisations where we now speak of races; (b) the stage or form of the civilisation of a people has no connection with its special inborn physical characteristics; (c) and even its physical characteristics are to no small extent the direct result of the environment, physical and social,. under which it is living at the moment. (B) To aid in clearing up the conceptions of race and civilisation, it would be of great value to define these.

8. (a) Each race might with advantage study the customs and civilisations of other races, even those it thinks the lowliest ones, for the definite purpose of improving its own customs and civilisation. (b) Unostentatious conduct generally and respect for the customs of other races, provided these are not morally objectionable, should be recommended to all who come in passing or permanent contact with members of other races.

9. (a) It would be well to collect accounts of any experiments on a considerable scale, past or present, showing the successful uplifting of relatively backward races by the application of purely humane methods; (b) also any cases of colonisation or opening of a country achieved by the same methods; (c) and such methods might be applied universally in our dealings with other races.

10. The Congress might effectively (a) carry out its object of encouraging better relations between East and West by encouraging or carrying out, among others, the above proposals, and more particularly (b) by encouraging the formation of an association designed to promote inter-racial amity.

[Paper submitted in English.]

SECOND SESSION

CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS (GENERAL PROBLEMS)

THE RATIONALE OF AUTONOMY

By JOHN M. ROBERTSON, M.P., London.

IN most discussions on the demands by members of subject races for self-governing institutions, there appears to be little recognition either of the strength of the historic case for autonomy, or of the vital danger of its perpetual prevention. Perhaps this is in part due to the mode in which such claims are usually pressed. The mouthpieces or champions of the depressed races commonly, and naturally, make the appeal to their masters on grounds of abstract right and justice; and, when met by the reply, "You are not qualified to govern yourselves," they as naturally retort with an indictment of the governing faculty of the controlling Power, and a claim to be equal in intelligence and civilisedness to other races who actually have attained autonomy. Thereafter the debate is apt to become a series of recriminations, the spokesmen of the ruling race using the language of contempt, and the other side the language of resentment.

Inasmuch as the handling of specific cases is apt to reopen such unprofitable disputes, it may be well to try to state the general case from the point of view of dispassionate political science, leaving for separate discussion the practical problems of method and initiation in given instances. To this end we have first to make clear the implications of the negative answer commonly given to the aspiring "native." It really amounts to confessing that all peoples who have not hitherto governed themselves are relatively undeveloped; that, in short, self-government is the prerequisite of any high level of social organisation and general capacity. This implication, however, is not always avowed, even

by the more thoughtful exponents of "imperialism" in our own day; and until recent times it was rather the exception than the rule for historians even to note that when, in ancient Greece and Rome, an end was put to the life of free discussion and political conflict, the general level of human faculty began to sink. The truth that the habit of constant debate and the perpetual practice of affairs are the vital conditions of intellectual and moral betterment for communities as wholes, is still far short of being a current axiom. Yet it is proved alike by the decay of the classic civilisations after the ending of autonomy and by the advance of modern civilisation hand in hand with autonomy. And no great subtlety of analysis is needed to explain the necessity.

Even the strongest champions of the rule of advanced over backward races admit the evils of despotism: it is indeed one of the main pleas of British imperialists that British rule is better for those under it than the "native" despotism which would be the only alternative. Yet the same reasoners constantly avow the fallibility of British rulers; inasmuch as they mostly belong to one of two parties, of each of which the members habitually impeach alike the capacity and the good faith of those of the other. Unless, then, it is alleged that a man confessedly fallible in dealing with the members of his own advanced race becomes infallible when dealing with men whose language, ideals, and religion are alien to his, it follows that mistakes are made by all dominant races in their treatment of subject races.

Is it to be desired, then, that the latter should be either too unintelligent to know when they are misruled or too apathetic to care? The avowal of either desire would obviously amount to a complete condemnation of the ideal or polity involving it. Every polity professes to aim at betterment. But where there exist no means of correction or protest on the part of those who suffer by errors of government, there must be generated either apathetic despair or a smouldering resentment. It would be gratuitously absurd to expect that the men of the "backward" race should be positively more patiently forgiving or more cheerfully tolerant than their "advanced" masters. If they can be so, they are the more "advanced" race of the two, in some of the main points of capacity for self-rule. If, on the other hand, they are not to be either brutalised or prostrated, they must think and criticise; and, as John Stuart Mill long ago pointed out, efficient thinking cannot coexist with a settled belief-however acquired or imposed-in the entire beneficence of the ruler. To cognise beneficence there is needed judgment, reflection on experience; and absolute faith in the superior wisdom of the ruler would soon make an end of the

very faculty of judging, by making an end of its exercise. An unexercised reason cannot subsist. In a word, if the ruled are to progress, they must think and judge; and if they think and judge they must from time to time be dissatisfied. There is no escape from the dilemma; and if the ruling race is at all conscientious, at all sincere in its professed desire for the betterment of its subjects, it must desire to know when and why they are dissatisfied. The need for reciprocity holds no less, albeit with a difference, in the case of the ruler. To exercise an absolute control over a community or a congeries of communities in the belief that one is absolutely infallible, is to tread the path of insanity.

To know that one is politically fallible, and yet never to care for the opinion of those whom one may be at any moment misgoverning, is to set conscience aside. Either way, demoralisation or deterioration follows as inevitably for the ruler as for the ruled.

All history proclaims the lesson. Whether we take ancient despots ruling empires through satraps, or States playing the despot to other States, the sequence is infallibly evil. Never is there any continuity of sound life. In the absence of control from the governed, the despotisms invariably grew corrupt and feeble. On the substitution of despotic rule for self-rule, all the forces of civilisation began to fail. The State Imperialism of Rome was even more utterly fatal than the personal imperialism of Alexander and his successors: it destroyed alike the primary power of selfdefence and the higher life throughout nearly its whole sphere, till all Western civilisation sank in chaos, and that of Byzantium survived in a state of mental stagnation only till as strong a barbarism assailed that as had overthrown the empire in the West. The domination of Florence over Pisa exhibited the fatality afresh; that of Spain over Italy had the same kind of double consequences; and the arbitrary rule of England over Scotland in the fourteenth century, and over France in the fifteenth, was similarly followed by periods of humiliation and decadence. It is only because of the much slighter implication of the national life in the remoter dominations of to-day that the harm is now so much less perceptible; the principle of harm can never be eliminated where the unsound relation subsists.

The contemporary problem may be put in a nutshell. Are the subject races of to-day progressing or not? If yes, they must be on the way, however slowly, to a measure of self-government. If not, the domination of the advanced races is a plain failure; and the talk of "beneficent rule" becomes an idle hypocrisy. The only possible alternative thesis is that the subject races are incapable of progress; and this is actually affirmed by some imperialists who