"This intelligentsia which spoke so confidently for "India", voicing "India's" demand for freedom and "India's" right to self-rule, numbered in truth less than one in a hundred of India's population. There was no need to take them and their secondhand liberal clichés seriously at all. The British had won India by the sword, and more than that, by the moral ascendancy behind the sword... India was accustomed to autocracy; the British sat comfortably enough in the throne vacated by the Moghuls, and until liberals created an Indian intelligentsia and told it that autocracy was wrong, no Indian resented autocracy. And even by the time of the Great War it was not the people at large but only the intellectuals who resented it... There was therefore no inevitable process of history to put a term to English rule in India. In 1914–18 the future of English rule in India lay still entirely in English hands. It depended on English nerve... Indeed the history of the French, Habsburg and Russian monarchies showed clearly enough that there could be no half-way or quarter-way houses between total autocracy and total abdication. If an autocracy can no longer rule by force of will and force of guns, concessions cannot preserve it, but only determine the manner of its extinction. Yet in 1919–21 the English continued to pursue the liberal fantasy of enlisting the goodwill of the Congress movement, and it was...this policy of appeasement that really brought about the revolutionary change in the position of the English in India."