To such interpretations of contemporary events young Indians, who at school read Burke and Byron and Mill “On Liberty,” and in secret the lives of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were bound to be receptive, and they soon reached from a different base along different lines the same ground on which the old orthodox foes not only of British rule but of Western civilisation stood who appealed to the Baghavat-Ghita and exhorted India to seek escape from the foreign domination that had enslaved her, body and soul, by clinging to the social and religious ark of Hinduism which in her golden age had made her wise and wealthy and free beyond all the nations of the earth.

The stronghold of orthodox reaction was in the Mahratta Deccan, and its stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never forgiven us for snatching the cup of power from their lips just when they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp.  First and foremost of them all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the Kesari, i.e. “The Lion,” how to play on religious as well as on racial sentiment.  He first took the field against the Hindu Social Reformers who dared to support Lord Lansdowne’s Age of Consent Bill, and his rabid campaign against them developed quickly into an equally rabid campaign against British rule.  He appealed to the pride of his Mahratta people by reviving the cult of Shivaji, the great Mahratta chieftain who first raised the standard of Hindu revolt against Mahomedan domination, and he appealed to their religious passions by placing under the patronage of their favourite deities a national movement for boycotting British-imported goods and manufactures which, under the name of Swadeshi, was to be the first step towards Swaraj.  He it was too who for the first time imported into schools and colleges the ferment of political agitation, and presided at bonfires which schoolboys and students fed with their European text-books and European clothes.  The movement died down for a time after the murder of two British officials in Poona on the night of Queen Victoria’s second jubilee in 1897 and the sentencing of Tilak himself shortly afterwards to a term of imprisonment on a charge of seditious and inflammatory writing.  But the Partition of Bengal was to give him the opportunity of transplanting his doctrines and his methods from the Deccan to the most prosperous province in India.

The Partition of Bengal was a measure harmless enough on the face of it for splitting up into two administrative units a huge province with some 70 million inhabitants which had outgrown the capacities of a single provincial government.  But the Bengalees are a singularly sensitive race.  They were intensely proud of their province as the senior of the three great “Presidencies” of India, of their capital as the capital city of India and the seat of Viceregal Government, and of