Rajah of Mahmudabad’s more delicate features of the Mahomedan aristocracy of the erstwhile kingdom of Oudh.  The white swadeshi garments affected by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, from the United Provinces—­who opened the last meeting of the Indian National Congress at Lahore with a presidential address which lasted for two hours and a quarter, and wound up with an apology for its brevity on the ground that he had had no time to prepare it—­testified, at any rate more loudly, to the sternness of his patriotic convictions than the equally swadeshi homespun, cut at least in European fashion, of another “advanced” politician, Mr. Bhupendranath Bose, of Bengal.  More worthy of attention was the keen, refined, and intellectual face of Mr. G.K.  Gokhale, the Deccanee Brahman with the Mahratta cap, who, by education, belongs to the West quite as much as to the East, and, by birth, to the ruling caste of the last dominant race before the advent of the British Raj.  The red fez worn by the majority of Mahomedan members showed that their community had certainly not failed in this instance to secure the generous measure of representation which Lord Minto spontaneously promised to them three years ago at Simla.  The peculiar glazed black headdress of the Parsee and the silk kerchief of the Burman in turn indicated the racial catholicity of the assembly in which Sir Sassoon David, of Bombay, worthily represents, by his authority as a financier, the small Jewish community of India.

Nor were the different interests and classes, with two important exceptions, less adequately represented than the different races and creeds.  Besides the great territorial magnates, of whom I have already mentioned two or three by name, there were not a few other well-known representatives of the landed interests which, in a country like India where agriculture is still the greatest of all national industries, have a special claim to respectful hearing, even though they have hitherto for the most part held aloof from the fashionable methods of political agitation.  There was indeed a good deal of disappointment among the urban professional classes, in whose eyes a Western education—­or rather education on what are, often quite erroneously, conceived to be Western lines—­should apparently constitute the one indispensable qualification for public life.  But they too had secured no inconsiderable number of seats, and if the voice of the Indian National Congress did not predominate it had certainly not been reduced to silence.

Doubts were freely expressed among Englishmen before the meetings of the new Councils as to the competence of the Anglo-Indian officials for the novel duties allotted to them in these assemblies.  It was argued, not unreasonably, that men who had never been trained or accustomed to take part in public discussions might find themselves at a disadvantage in controversial encounters with the quick-witted Hindu politician.  It is generally admitted now that the first Session