The statesman and colonial administrator Lord Milner’s imperialist “Credo” had been published posthumously in The Times.
THE Aga Khan has published a striking criticism of Lord Milner’s “Credo”. He points out that the “British race patriotism”, of which Lord Milner boasted, is of little use in binding together an Empire that includes men of different races, different cultures, and different religions. Macaulay was the founder of the system of Indian education intended to Anglicize the Hindoo. It has been a complete failure. The educated Indians to-day are, as the Aga Khan says, “no less proud than Englishmen of their own traditions and teachings in religion, philosophy, poetry, romance, and art”. The East is more and more resolutely declining to be Occidentalized. Both Roman emperors and Renaissance sovereigns believed that unity of religious belief was necessary to imperial and national solidarity. That view is now generally rejected, but we are by no means certain that within the next century there will not be considerable evidence of’ its truth. Anyhow, it is quite obvious that if the Empire is to continue, race patriotism must be succeeded by imperial patriotism, which seems to us a far more difficult and unnatural development than the European patriotism that actually existed before the Reformation.
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