Is it legitimate . . . to infer that because the Aryans early spread to the South . . . and extended themselves over the peninsula, they also origina… - George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

[The Indian Empire is] the miracle of the world.

We may also, I think, congratulate ourselves on the part that the British Empire has played in this struggle, and on the position which it fills at the close. Among the many miscalculations of the enemy was the profound conviction, not only that we had a "contemptible little Army," but that we were a doomed and decadent nation. The trident was to be struck from our palsied grasp, the Empire was to crumble at the first shock; a nation dedicated, as we used to be told, to pleasure-taking and the pursuit of wealth was to be deprived of the place to which it had ceased to have any right, and was to be reduced to the level of a second-class, or perhaps even of a third-class Power. It is not for us in the hour of victory to boast that these predictions have been falsified; but, at least, we may say this—that the British Flag never flew over a more powerful or a more united Empire than now; Britons never had better cause to look the world in the face; never did our voice count for more in the councils of the nations, or in determining the future destinies of mankind. That that voice may be raised in the times that now lie before us in the interests of order and liberty, that that power may be wielded to secure a settlement that shall last, that that Flag may be a token of justice to others as well as of pride to ourselves, is our united hope and prayer.

I suppose that to the bulk of Englishmen present today the Indian Mutiny of 1857 is already a tradition, rather than a memory. It happened before many of us were born. Already it is receding into the dim corridors of the past, and is surrounded with an almost mystic halo as one of the great national epics of our race. But to all of us, young or old, it is one of the combined tragedies and glories of the British nation—a tragedy because there were concentrated into those terrible months the agony and the suffering almost of centuries; a glory because great names leaped to light, high and ennobling deeds were done, and best of all, and most enduring of all, there sprang from all that havoc and disaster the majestic fabric of an India united under a single Crown, governed as we have tried to govern it, and are still trying to govern it, by the principles of justice, truth, and righteousness—a spectacle which, if the entire Empire were to shrivel up to-morrow like a scroll in the fire, would still be a supreme vindication of its existence and its accomplishment in the history of mankind.