their Calcutta University as the first and greatest of Indian Universities, though already menaced, they declared, by Lord Curzon’s Universities Act.  They resented the Partition, against which they had no remedy, as a wanton diminutio capitis inflicted upon them by a despotic Viceroy bent on chastising them for the prominent part played by their leaders in pressing the claims of India to political emancipation from bureaucratic leading-strings.  That in the new province of Eastern Bengal, which was to be created by the Partition, the Mahomedans would constitute a large majority and enjoy advantages hitherto denied to them as a minority in the undivided province was an added grievance for the Hindus.  Lord Curzon had not at first been unpopular with the Western-educated classes.  They recognised his great intellectual gifts and admired his majestic eloquence.  But continuing to fasten their hopes on the Liberal party in England, they had quickly followed its lead in attacking him as a dangerous Imperialist, whose Tibetan adventure was saddling the Indian tax-payer with the costs of his aggressive foreign policy, and they required no promptings to denounce as the sworn foe of India a Viceroy who had not only sought to restrict the statutory freedom of their University, but, as its Chancellor, used language into which they read a deliberate insult to the Bengalee character.  By partitioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee “nation” and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose honour the old invocation to the goddess Kali, “Bande Materam,” or “Hail to the Mother,” acquired a new significance and came to be used as the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism.  To that war-cry public meetings were organised in Calcutta and all over the province.  The native press teemed with denunciatory articles.  The wildest rumours were set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which partition portended.  Never had India seen such popular demonstrations.  Government, however, remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India—­the last and perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period in which efficient administration had come to be regarded as the be-all and end-all of government.  His resignation, however, had nothing to do with the Partition.  He had fought and been defeated by Lord Kitchener, then, and largely at his instance, Commander-in-Chief in India, over the reorganisation of the military administration.  Lord Curzon stood for the supremacy of the civil over the military authority, but he made the mistake of resigning not on the question of principle, on which he finally agreed to a compromise, but on a subsidiary point which, fatal as he may have thought it to the spirit of the compromise, appeared to the outside public to be mainly a personal question.  In any case, though on the merits of the quarrel he might have looked for support from educated Indian opinion, Bengal was content to rejoice over his disappearance and to wonder whether with its author the Partition might not also disappear.