ABSTRACT
The English people had fought for their independence of the Spaniard and the Pope, of royal absolutism, and of the French; they had looked with sympathy on the struggles for independence of the Greeks, the Italians, and the peoples of the Balkans; they had acquiesced in the British Dominions’ gradual acquisition of the right to manage their own affairs; and many of them regarded the
political aspirations o f nationalist Indians or Egyptians as having greater moral force than the interests of Britain in those lands. Such idealists were only a minority; but for the reasons previously stated, the majority o f the British people were reluctant to resort to any extreme measures to maintain the imperial status-quo unchanged. The nationalists of the Middle East and elsewhere were consequently able from 1918 onwards to obtain greater concessions by pressure and violence than reasoned argument would probably have achieved; and not being aware o f the symptoms in the British public mind which favoured their own violent course, they attributed their success solely to that violence and were encouraged to continue in it.1
