It was so much easier for Indians to unite on a common political platform against British methods of government than on a platform of social and religious reforms which offended many different prejudices and threatened many vested interests.  The Congress developed into a purely political body, and like all self-constituted bodies with no definite responsibilities it showed greater capacity for acrid criticism, often quite uninformed, than for any constructive policy.  As the years passed on without any tangible results from its expanding flow of oratory and long “omnibus” resolutions, proposed and carried more or less automatically at every annual session, it turned away from the old exponents of constitutional agitation to the fiery champions of very different methods, and almost insensibly favoured the dangerous growth both inside it and outside it of the new forces, and of the old forces in new shapes, which were to explode into the open with such unforeseen violence after the Partition of Bengal in 1905.

If, however, when that explosion came the Western-educated classes were against us rather than with us, the explanation cannot be sought only in their continued exclusion from all real participation in the counsels of Government, or in the refusal of the political rights for which they had vainly agitated, or even in a general reaction against the earlier acceptance of the essential superiority of the West.  A much more acute and substantial grievance, which affected also their material interests, was the badge of inferiority imposed upon them in the public services.  Not till 1886 had Government appointed a Commission to report upon a reorganisation of the public services, and its recommendations profoundly disappointed Indian expectations.  For only a narrow door was opened for the admission of Indians into the higher Civil Service, and all public services were divided into two nearly water-tight compartments, the one labelled Imperial, recruited in England and reserved in practice, as to most of the superior posts, for Englishmen, and the other recruited in India mainly from Indians, but labelled Provincial and clearly intended to be inferior.  Such a system bore the stamp, barely disguised, of racial discrimination, at variance with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Queen’s Proclamation—­and this at a time when Indian universities and colleges were bearing abundant fruit, and some of it at least of a good quality.

The diffusion of Western education had, it is true, produced other and less healthy results, but the inquiry into Indian education instituted by Government in 1882 had been unfortunately blind to them.  Diffusion had been attained largely by a dangerous process of dilution, as side by side with the European schools and colleges, either under Government control or State-aided, which had grown and multiplied, many had been also started and supported by Indian private enterprise, often ill-equipped for their task.  The training