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The Revolution. If neither British nor Indians completely understand the problem of India, certainly one Frenchwoman thought she did. After chic Biographer-Journalist Eve Curie met Sir Stafford Cripps in India last week, she wrote: "I came away . . . with the impression that in New Delhi ... I was not only witnessing the birth of self-government in India but the awakening of a new spirit in England itself?the bold, generous spirit without which neither Great Britain nor any other country can hope to win the war." Mlle. Curie's observation was almost as accurate as it was bold. Sir Stafford had indeed gone to New Delhi with something bigger than just a plan for India. He brought from No. 10 Downing Street an idea vaster than Mlle. Curie's generous, feminine hopes?vaster, even, than Britain's old ideas of empire.
Though Winston Churchill's War Cabinet formulated its present-day version and Sir Stafford Cripps attempted to interpret it to the Indians, neither statesman originated the idea. It was conceived?no man could say when or how?somewhere in the British spirit; it could be interpreted (by Britain's friends) as a marrow-rooted sense of decency, or (by Britain's enemies) as a guilty conscience. Neither interpretation quite explained Sir Stafford Cripp's mission. The rough idea (as British as it was understated) was that people everywhere should have more freedom and more fruits of the earth. Millions of Britons nodded approval when Sir Stafford, in one of his first speeches in Parliament as a member of the War Cabinet, said that Britain could regain and hold her empire only "on condition that we hold it in the interest of the world and of the people who live in those parts."
In the last two years a revolution has been taking place in beleaguered Britain. It has been a thoroughly novel make of revolution: quiet, moderate, nonviolent, for the violence has been directed at the real oppressor, the enemy.
Pursuing individual freedom, the British have survived many forms of government. They believe that their 1918-1939 Government was unworthy to govern. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, they now feel, represented an era in which that individual freedom was made parochial, in which Britain's moral empire was considered less important than world trade. After the Norway fiasco, when Britain was threatened with annihilation, the British turned to Winston Churchill, a desperado whose heart was in the right place, to save them. He did save them, and Britain will never for get it.
But as the war progressed?particularly after the entry of Russia and the U.S.?the British wanted more than a savior. When they saw that they did not face probable death, but probable victory, they began to think about the future again. And they found that they had to think in world terms, in terms of empire. To a people who had not for decades consciously thought in those terms, this attempt was unsettling. Winston Churchill was a godsend to Britons, because he alone revived in them a sense of their historic greatness and the idealism which underlay their mundane pursuits. But he was not prepared to mark out their future for them.