of genuine co-operation between British and Indians.  During the Mutiny there were few of the Western-educated classes whose loyalty to the British Raj ever wavered.  Fifty years later, when the Raj was confronted with a less violent but more insidious movement of revolt, a large part of the Western-educated classes, whose influence and numbers had increased immensely in the interval, were, if not in league, at least to some extent in sympathy with it, and many of those who deplored and reprobated it remained sulking in their tents.  Government, they declared, had always despised their co-operation.  As it had made its bed, so it must lie.  It was a desperately short-sighted attitude, which has had its nemesis in the “Non-co-operation” movement of the present day.  But, in a situation so severely strained, relief could only come from England and from a return to the earlier British ideals, and to those Indians who still looked for it there with some confidence after the change of Government which had taken place at home in December 1905 it seemed to come very slowly.

CHAPTER VII

THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS

A British Government of a more advanced type of liberalism than any of its Liberal predecessors found itself confronted as soon as it took office with a more difficult situation in India than had ever been dreamt of since the Mutiny, and the difficulties grew rapidly more grave.  When Mr. Morley went to the India Office during the respite from agitation against the Partition of Bengal, procured by the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India even more than by Lord Curzon’s departure from India, the new Secretary of State allowed himself to be persuaded that an agitation directed, so far, mainly against a harmless measure of mere administrative importance must be largely artificial, and he determined to maintain the Partition.  He was entirely new to Indian affairs, and his Recollections show him to have been often sorely perplexed by the conflict between his own political instincts and the picture of Indian conditions placed before him by his official advisers at home and in India.  He felt, however, on the whole fairly confident that he could deal with the situation by producing a moderate measure of reforms which would satisfy India’s political aspirations and by keeping an extremely vigilant eye on Indian methods of administration of which “sympathy” was in future to be the key-note rather than mere efficiency.  But when in the course of 1907 the agitation broke out afresh with increased fury and began to produce a crop of political outrages, Mr. Morley found himself in a particularly awkward position.  He was known from his Irish days to be no believer in coercion.  But the Government of India was not to be denied when it insisted that a campaign of murder could not be tolerated and that repression was as necessary as reform.  The Secretary of