If we look back upon the half-century after the Mutiny and before the Partition of Bengal, which may be regarded as closing that long period of paternal but autocratic government, it was one of internal peace and of material progress which the large annual output of eloquent statistics may be left to demonstrate. In 1857 there were not 200 miles of railways in India, in 1905 there was a network of railways amounting to over 28,000 miles, and the telegraph system expanded during the same period from 4500 to 60,000 miles. The development of a great system of irrigation canals added large new tracts of hitherto barren wastes to the cultivable area of the country, and an elaborate machinery of precautionary measures and relief works was created to mitigate the hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls. The incidence and methods of collection of the land-tax, the backbone of Indian revenue, were carefully corrected and perfected, and the burden of taxation readjusted and on the whole lightened. Those were the days of laisser-faire, laisser-aller at home, and it was not deemed to be part of the duties of government to give any special protection to Indian commerce, whilst the operation of free trade principles in India checked the industrial development of the country. Nevertheless the internal and external trade of India expanded continually, and the cotton mills in Western India, and the jute mills in Calcutta, as well as the opening up of coal mines in Bengal and of gold mines in Southern India showed how great were the natural resources of the peninsula still awaiting development; and under Lord Curzon's administration, which reached during the first years of the present century the high-water mark of efficiency, a department was created to deal specially with commerce and industry. In spite of several famines of unusual intensity and of the appearance in India in 1896 of a new scourge in the shape of the bubonic plague, which has carried off since then over eight million people, the population increased by leaps and bounds, and the census of 1901 showed it to have reached in our Indian Empire the huge figure of nearly 300,000,000—which it has since then exceeded by another 20,000,000—or about a fifth of the estimated population of the whole globe. It had risen since the first census officially recorded in 1871 by nearly 30 per cent—no mean evidence that fifty years of peaceful and efficient administration had produced an increased sense of welfare and confidence.

The great bulk of the population, mostly a simple and ignorant peasantry whose horizon does not extend beyond their own village and the fields that surround it, accepted with more or less conscious gratitude the material benefits conferred upon them by alien rulers with whom they were seldom brought into actual contact save through the occasional presence of a District officer on tour, almost invariably humane and kindly and anxious to do even-handed justice to all. Another class of Indians, chiefly dwellers in large cities, infinitesimally small numerically but constantly increasing in numbers and still more rapidly in activity and influence, saw, however, in an autocratic form of government, of which it even questioned the efficiency, an insurmountable barrier to the aspirations which Western education had taught it to entertain. The list of graduates from Indian Universities lengthened every year, the number of schools and colleges in which young Indians acquired at least the rudiments of Western knowledge grew and multiplied in every province. Western-educated Indians flocked to the bar; they showed themselves qualified for most of the liberal professions; they filled every post that was open to them in the public services. But where, they asked with growing impatience, was the fulfilment of the hopes which they had founded on the Queen's Proclamation of 1858? There had been perhaps no departure from the letter of the Proclamation, but had its spirit been translated into effective practice? Was it never to be interpreted in the same generous sense in which a still earlier generation of British administrators had interpreted their mission as a means to train the Indians to protect and govern themselves?

The Indian army, reorganised after the Mutiny, displayed all its old qualities of loyalty and gallantry in the course of the numerous foreign expeditions in which it was employed in co-operation with the British army, in Egypt and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, China, and Tibet, in addition to the chronic frontier fighting on the turbulent North-West border. The menace of Russia's persistent expansion towards India through Central Asia and the ascendancy for which she was at the same time striving in the Near East and the Far East, and later on the far more real menace of German aspirations to world-dominion, lent added importance to the maintenance of an efficient Indian army as an essential factor in the defensive forces of the Empire. But there was no departure from the old system under which not only were army administration and all the higher commands reserved for British officers, but the whole army was kept as a fighting machine entirely dependent upon British leadership. The native officers of an Indian regiment, mostly promoted from the ranks, could in no circumstances rise to a position in which they might give orders to a British officer, whilst, however senior in years and service, they were under the orders of the youngest British subaltern gazetted to the regiment. No other system was indeed possible so long as no attempt was made to give to Indians any higher military training, or to hold out to them any prospects of promotion beyond those within their reach by enlistment in the ranks. These Indian officers, drawn from races that had acquired a martial reputation and often from families with whom military service was an hereditary tradition, were as a rule not only very fine fighters but gallant native gentlemen, between whom and their British officers there existed very cordial relations, human and professional, based upon an instinctive recognition of differences of education and similarities of tastes on both sides. But such a system, however well it worked in practice for the production of a reliable fighting machine, was not calculated to train the Indians to protect themselves.

That nothing was done to open up a military career to the Western-educated classes was not at first more than a sentimental grievance. But when the years passed and they still waited for that larger share in the government and even in the administration of their country to which the British Parliament had recognised their claim as far back as the Act of 1833, their faith even in the professed purpose of British rule began to waver. At first the leaders of the Indian intelligentsia, some of whom had learned the value of British institutions and of the freedom of British public life, not merely through English literature but through years of actual residence in England, preferred to hold the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy alone or chiefly responsible for the long delay in the fulfilment of hopes which they in fact regarded as rights. Their confidence in British statesmanship and in the British Parliament remained unshaken for nearly thirty years after the Mutiny, though they were perhaps not unnaturally inclined to put their trust chiefly in the Liberal party which had been most closely associated with the promotion of a progressive policy towards India in the past. Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty confirmed them in the belief that from the Conservative party they had little to hope for, and his drastic Press Act of 1879, though not unprovoked by the virulent abuse of Government in some of the vernacular papers and the reckless dissemination of alarmist rumours during the worst period of the Afghan troubles, was held to foreshadow a return all along the line to purely despotic methods of government. But his departure from India after Lord Beaconsfield's defeat at the general election of 1880 and the return of the Liberal party to power quickened new hopes which Lord Ripon, when he became Viceroy in succession to Lord Lytton, showed every disposition to justify.

All the greater was the disillusionment when a measure, introduced for the purpose of abolishing "judicial disqualifications based on race distinctions," not only provoked fierce opposition amongst the whole European community and even amongst the rank and file of the civil service, but was ultimately whittled down in deference to that opposition until the very principle at issue was virtually surrendered. Indians resented this fresh assertion of racial superiority, and saw in the violence of the agitation, sometimes not far removed from threats of actual lawlessness, and in the personal abuse poured out by his own countrymen on the Queen's representative, the survival amongst a large section of Europeans of the same hatred that had invented for a Viceroy who was determined to temper justice with mercy after the Mutiny the scornful nickname of "Clemency Canning."

The fate of the Ilbert Bill taught the Indians above all one practical lesson—the potency of agitation. If by agitation a Viceroy enjoying the full confidence of the British Government, with a powerful Parliamentary majority behind it, could be compelled by the British community in India, largely consisting of public servants, to surrender a great principle of policy, then the only hope for Indians was to learn to agitate in their own interests, and to create a political organisation of their own in order both to educate public opinion in India and influence public opinion in England. The men who started the Indian National Congress were inspired by no revolutionary ambitions. Though they did not talk, as Mr. Gandhi does to-day, about producing a "change of hearts" in their British rulers, that was their purpose and unlike Mr. Gandhi, they were firm believers not in any racial superiority, but in the superiority of Western civilisation and of British political institutions which they deemed not incapable of transplantation on to Indian soil. So on December 28, 1885, a small band of Indian gentlemen, who represented the elite of the Western-educated classes, met in Bombay to hold the first session of the Indian National Congress which, with all its many shortcomings, even in its earlier and better days, was destined to play a far more important part than was for a long time realised by Englishmen in India or at home. Many of them—such as Mr. Bonnerji, a distinguished Bengalee, Pherozeshah Mehta, a rising member of the great Parsee community in Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji, who was later on to be the first Indian to put forward plainly India's claim to self-government within the British Empire—had spent several years in England. Others, like Ranade and Telang, had been for a long time past vigorous advocates of Indian social reforms. With them were a few Englishmen—chief among them a retired civilian Mr. Hume—who were in complete sympathy with their aspirations. Only the Mahomedans were unrepresented, though not uninvited, partly because few of them had been caught up in the current of Western thought and education, and partly because the community as a whole, reflecting the ancient and deep-seated antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, distrusted profoundly every movement in which Hindus were the leading spirits. Lord Reay, who was then Governor of Bombay, was invited to preside and declined only after asking for instructions from the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, who, though not unfriendly, held that it was undesirable for the head of a Provincial Government to associate himself with what should essentially be a popular movement. Mr. Bonnerji, who was selected to take the chair, emphatically proclaimed the loyalty of the Congress to the British Crown. Amongst the most characteristic resolutions moved and carried was one demanding the appointment of a Royal Commission, on which the people of India should be represented, to inquire into the working of the Indian administration, and another pleading for a large expansion of the Indian Legislative Councils and the creation of a Standing Committee of the House of Commons to which the majority in those Councils should have the right to appeal if overruled by the Executive.

The Congress claimed to represent the educated opinion of India, and, though Government withheld from it all official recognition, it flattered itself not without reason that its preaching had not fallen on to altogether barren soil when, still under Lord Dufferin's Viceroyalty, the Indian Local Government Act of 1888 marked a large advance upon the reforms in local and municipal institutions which, with the repeal of the Lytton Press Act, had been amongst the few tangible results of Lord Ripon's "Pro-Indian" Viceroyalty; for it fulfilled many of the demands which Indian Liberals, and notably Pherozeshah Mehta, had urged for years past for a more effective share in municipal administration. Still greater was the satisfaction when, under Lord Lansdowne's Viceroyalty, the British Parliament passed in 1892 an Indian Councils Act, for which Lord Dufferin himself had paved the way by admitting that Government could and should rely more largely upon the experience and advice of responsible Indians. The functions and the constitution of both the Viceroy's and the Provincial Legislative Councils, though their powers remained purely consultative, were substantially enlarged by the addition of a considerable number of unofficial members representing, at least in theory, all classes and interests, who were given the right to put questions to the Executive on matters of administration and, in the case of the Viceroy's Council, to discuss the financial policy of Government if and when the budget to be laid before it involved fresh taxation. The Act of 1892 did not, however, admit "the living forces of the elective principle" on which the Congress leaders had laid their chief stress, and they went on pressing "not for Consultative Councils, but for representative institutions." Their hopes never perhaps rose so high as when one of their own veterans, Dadabhai Naoroji—though Lord Salisbury could not resist a jibe at the expense of the "black man"—entered the House of Commons as Liberal member for Central Finsbury. It must be conceded that, had Government at that time taken the Congress by the hand instead of treating it with disdain and suspicion, it might have played loyally and usefully a part analogous to that of "Her Majesty's Opposition" at home—a part which Lord Dufferin had been shrewd enough in the beginning not to dismiss as altogether impossible or undesirable. Its claim to represent Indian opinion, as, within certain limits, it unquestionably did, was ignored, and it was left to drift without any attempt at official guidance into waters none the less dangerous because they seemed shallow. It quickly attracted a large following among the urban middle classes all over India. But as the number of those who attended its annual sessions, held in turn in every province, grew larger, it became less amenable to the guiding and restraining influence of those who had created it, and especially of those who had hoped to lead it in the path of social and religious reform as well as of political advancement.

The social and religious reform movement which had been of great promise before the Mutiny and for some years afterwards, when Keshab Chundra Sen gave the Brahmo Somaj a fine uplift, slackened. Like the Brahmo Somaj in Bengal, the Prirthana Somaj in Bombay no longer made so many or such fervent recruits. New societies sprang up in defence of the old faiths, some even glorifying all their primitive customs and superstitions, and most of them, whilst professing to recognise the need for cleansing them of their grosser accretions, displaying a marked reaction against the West in their avowed determination to seek reform only in a return to the purer doctrines of early Hinduism. The most important of all these movements was the Arya Somaj in the Punjab, whose watchwords were "Back to the Vedas" and "Arya for the Aryans." The latter has sometimes barely disguised a more than merely platonic desire to see the British disappear out of the Aryan land of India. But the Vedas at any rate yielded to the searchers sufficient fruitful authority for promoting female education on sound moral lines and for discouraging idolatry and relaxing the cruel bondage of caste. That it has been and still is in many respects a powerful influence for good is now generally admitted by those even whom its political tendencies have alarmed. New sects arose within Hinduism.[1] An ardent apostle of the Hindu revival in Bengal, Swami Vivekananda, was the most impressive and picturesque figure at the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 and made converts in America and in Europe, amongst them in England the gifted poetess best known under her Hindu name as Sister Nivedita. How strong was the hold regained by the purely reactionary forces in Hinduism was suddenly shown in the furious campaign against Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill in 1891 which brought Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Chitawan Brahman of Poona, for the first time into public life as the champion of extreme Hindu orthodoxy. That measure was intended to mitigate the evils of infant marriage by raising the age for the woman's consent to its consummation from ten to twelve, and the death quite recently of a young Hindu girl of eleven in Calcutta due to the violence inflicted upon her by a husband nearly twenty years older than she was, had enlisted very widespread support for Government amongst enlightened Hindus and especially amongst the Western-educated. Tilak did not defeat the Bill, but his unscrupulous attacks, not only upon the British rulers of India but upon his own more liberal co-religionists, including men of such ability and character as Telang and Ranade, dealt a sinister blow at the social reform movement, which practically died out of the Congress when he and his friends began to establish their ascendancy over it.

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 of Indian teachers could hardly keep pace with the demand, either as to quantity or quality, and with overcrowded classes even the best institutions suffered from the loss of individual contact between the European teacher and the Indian scholar. Western education had been started in India at the top, whence it was expected to filter down by some strange and unexplained process of gravitation. Attention was concentrated on higher and secondary education, to which primary education was at first entirely sacrificed. Whereas Lord William Bentinck had declared the great object of Government to be the promotion of both Western science and literature, scarcely any effort was made—perhaps because most Anglo-Indians had a leaning towards the humanities—to correct by the encouragement of scientific studies the natural bent of the Indian mind towards a purely literary education. Yet the Indian mind being specially endowed with the gift of imagination and prone to speculative thought stands in particular need of the corrective discipline afforded by the study of exact science. Again, the reluctance of Government to appear even to interfere with Indian moral and religious conceptions, towards which it was pledged to observe absolute neutrality, tended to restrict the domain of education to the purely intellectual side. Yet, religion having always been in India the basic element of life, and morality apart from religion an almost impossible conception, that very aspect of education to which Englishmen profess to attach the highest value, and of which Mr. Gokhale in a memorable speech admitted Indians to stand in special need, viz. the training of character, was gravely neglected.

Whilst from lack of any settled policy Indian education was drifting on to rocks and quicksands, and the personal influence of Englishmen on the younger generation diminished in an officialised educational service, gradual changes in the material conditions of European life in India tended to keep British and Indians more rather than less apart. Greater facilities of travel between England and India, and the growth of "hill stations" in which Europeans congregated during the hot season, made it easier for Englishwomen to live in India, though, when the time came for children to be sent home for their education, the choice continued to lie between separation of husband and wife, or of mother and children. But if the presence of a larger feminine element was calculated to exercise a refining and restraining influence on Anglo-Indian society, it did not promote the growth of intimate social relations between Europeans and Indians, as Indian habits and domestic institutions, and especially the seclusion of women, created an even greater barrier, which only slowly and rarely yielded to the influences of Western education, between European and Indian ladies than between the men of the two races. Englishwomen even more than Englishmen continued to be haunted by the memories of the Mutiny, which remained painfully present to a generation who, whether Indians or British, had lived through that tempest, and if to Indians the Mutiny recalled such scenes as "The Blowing of Indians from British Guns" which the great Russian painter Verestchagin depicted with the same realism as the splendid pageant of the entry of the Prince of Wales into Delhi in 1876, it was the horrors of Cawnpore that chiefly dwelt in the minds of Europeans. Many Englishmen and Englishwomen owed their lives during the Mutiny to the devotion and courage of Indians who helped them to escape, and sheltered them sometimes for months at no slight risk to themselves. But the spirit of treachery and cruelty revealed in the Mutiny and personified in a Nana Sahib, who had disappeared into space but, according to frequently recurrent rumour, was still alive somewhere, chilled the feelings of trustfulness and goodwill of an earlier generation. Again, whilst there was a large increase in the number of young Indians who went to England to complete their studies—especially technical studies for which only tardy and inadequate facilities were provided in their own country—and many of them, left to their own devices in our large cities, brought back to India a closer familiarity with the unedifying rather than the edifying aspects of Western civilisation, the development of European industries and the railway and telegraph services, which at first at least required the employment of Europeans in subordinate capacities, imported into India a new type of European, with many good qualities, but rather more prone than those of better breeding and education to glory in his racial superiority and to bring it home somewhat roughly to the Indians with whom he associated. The ignorance of European and American globe-trotters who were finding their way to India also often offended Indian susceptibilities. Add to many causes of friction, almost inevitable sometimes between people whose habits and ideas are widely different, the effect of a trying climate upon the European temper—never, for instance, even at home at its best when travelling—and one need hardly be surprised that unpleasant incidents occurred in which, sometimes under provocation and sometimes under none, Englishmen who ought to have known better were guilty of gross affronts upon Indians. Such incidents were never frequent, but, even if there had been no tendency on the part of Indians to magnify and on the part of Englishmen to minimise their gravity, they were frequent enough to cause widespread heartburning, and in not a few cases political hatred has had its origin in the rancour created by personal insults to which even educated Indians of good position have occasionally been subjected by Englishmen who fancied themselves, but were not, their betters. That Indians also could be, and were sometimes, offensive they were generally apt to forget, as they forgot in their denunciations of Lord Curzon at the time of the Partition of Bengal that he had not shrunk from incurring great unpopularity in some Anglo-Indian circles by insisting upon adequate punishment of all Europeans guilty of violence towards Indians. Apart from such collisions nothing rankled more with Indians of the better classes than their rigid exclusion from the European clubs in India. Even the few who were members of, or had been admitted at home as visitors to, the best London clubs were debarred, when they landed in Bombay, even from calling on their English friends at the Yacht Club. Europeans could see nothing in this but the right of every club to restrict its membership and frame its regulations as it chooses. Indians could see nothing in it but humiliating racial discrimination. The question has now been more or less solved by the creation in most of the large cities in India of new clubs to which Indians and Europeans are equally eligible, and in which those who choose can meet on terms of complete equality and good fellowship. But it constituted one of the grievances which contributed to the estrangement of the Western educated classes during the latter part of the last century.

Though social friction assisted that estrangement its chief cause lay much deeper. After the Mutiny government under the direct authority of the Crown lost the flexibility which the vigilant control of the British Parliament had imparted to the old system of government under the East India Company with every periodical renewal of its charter. The system remained what it had inevitably been from the beginning of British rule, a system devised by foreigners and worked by foreigners—at its best a trusteeship committed to them for the benefit of the people of India, but to be discharged on the sole judgment and discretion of the British trustees. The Mutiny shook the finer faith which had contemplated the finality some day or other of the trusteeship and introduced Western education into India as the agency by which Indians were to be prepared to resume when that day came the task of governing and protecting themselves. There was a tacit assumption now, if never officially formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of Indians who claimed both a share in the administration and a voice in the framing of policy. Executive and administrative functions were vested practically in the same hands, i.e. in the hands of a great and ubiquitous bureaucracy more and more jealous of its power and of its infallibility in proportion as the latter began to be questioned and the former to be attacked by the class of Indians who had learned to speak the same language and to profess the same ideals.

The constant additions made to the huge machinery of administration in order to meet the growing needs of the country on the approved lines of a modern state resulted in increased centralisation. New departments were created and old ones expanded, but even when the highest posts in them were not specifically or in practice reserved for the Indian Civil Service, it retained the supreme control over them as the corps d'elite from which most of the members of the Viceroy's Executive Council, i.e. the Government of India, were recruited. The District Officer remained the pivot and pillar of British administration throughout rural India, and he kept as closely as he could in touch with the millions of humble folk committed to his care, though the multiplication of codes and regulations and official reports and statistics involving heavy desk work kept him increasingly tied to his office. But the secretariats, which from the headquarters of provincial governments as well as from the seat of supreme government directed and controlled the whole machine, became more and more self-centred, more and more imbued with a sense of their own omniscience. Even the men with district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided themselves on being the repositories of all the arcana of "good government." Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be regarded as the one test that mattered, and it was a test which only Englishmen were competent to apply and which Indians were required to accept as final whatever their wishes or their experience might be.

Herein perhaps more than anywhere else lay the secret of the antagonism between the British bureaucracy and the Western-educated Indians which gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency reached its apogee—himself the incarnation of efficiency and unquestionably the greatest and most indefatigable administrator that Britain sent out to India during that period. It would be unfair to suppose that that antagonism was due on either side to mere narrow prejudice or sordid jealousy. Indians who resented their exclusion from the share in the administration of their country for which they believed their education to have qualified them, and which they claimed as the fulfilment of repeated promises and of the declared purpose of British rule, may not have been free from a human appetite for loaves and fishes. British officials who were loath to recognise those claims, or to concede to Indians any substantial proportion of their privileged posts and emoluments, may have been not always unselfishly indifferent to the material interests and prospects of the services to which they belonged, if not to their own personal interests and prospects. But apart from any such considerations, the attitude of both parties was governed by the firm belief, not in itself discreditable to either, that it possessed the better knowledge of the needs and interests and wishes of the vast populations of India, still too ignorant and inarticulate to give expression of their own to them. The lamentable effects of the estrangement between British administrators and the very class of Indians whose co-operation it had been one of the main objects of British policy ever since the Act of 1833 to promote, never stood clearly revealed till the sudden wave of unrest that followed the Partition of Bengal, and it is upon future co-operation between them that the success of the great constitutional experiment now being made must ultimately depend. It is therefore well to try to understand the conflicting sentiments and opinions which drove asunder the moderate but progressive Western-educated Indian and the earnest but conservative British administrator, and ended by bringing them almost into open conflict. The Western-educated Indian claimed recognition at our hands first and foremost because he was the product of the educational system we ourselves imposed upon India. His limitations, intellectual and moral, were largely due to the defects of that system, just as his political immaturity was largely due to our failure to provide him with opportunities of acquiring experience in administrative work and public life. Where careers had been opened up to him in the liberal professions he had often achieved great distinction—at the Bar, on the Bench, in literature—and he had proved himself quite competent to fill all the posts accessible to him in the public services. Without his assistance in the many subordinate branches the everyday work of administration could not have been carried on for a day. He contended that he must intuitively be a better judge than aliens, who were, after all, birds of passage, of the needs and interests and wishes of his own fellow-countrymen, and a better interpreter to them of so much of Western thought and Western civilisation as they could safely absorb without becoming denationalised. His complaint was that his own best efforts and best intentions were constantly thwarted by the rigid conservatism and aloofness of the European, official and unofficial, wrapped up in his racial and bureaucratic superiority. He admitted that he might not yet be able to discharge with the European's efficiency the legislative or administrative responsibilities for which he had hitherto been denied the necessary training, but he protested against being kept altogether out of the water until he had learnt to swim, especially when there was so little disposition ever to teach him to swim. What he lacked in the way of efficiency he alone, he argued, could supply in the way of sympathy with and understanding of his own people. When it was objected that he represented only a very small minority of Indians, and formed, indeed, a class widely divided from the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen, and that the democratic institutions for which he clamoured were unsuited to the traditions and customs of his country, he replied that in every country the impulse towards democratic institutions had come in the first instance from small minorities and had always been regarded at first as subversive and revolutionary. If, again, it was objected that the moderate and reasonable views he expressed were not the views of the more ambitious politicians who professed to be the accredited interpreters of Western-educated India, that there were many amongst them whose aims were more or less openly antagonistic to all the ideals for which British rule stands, and were directed in reality not to the establishment of democratic institutions but to the maintenance of caste monopoly and other evils inherent to the Hindu social system, and that in the political arena he seemed incapable of asserting himself against these dangerous and reactionary elements, his reply was once more that he had never received the support and encouragement which he had a right to expect from his European mentors, and that it was often their indifference or worse that had chiefly helped to raise a spirit of revolt against every form of Western influence.

The case for the British administrator can be still more easily stated. Britain has never sent out a finer body of public servants, take them all in all, than those who have in the course of a few generations rescued India from anarchy, secured peace for her at home and abroad, maintained equal justice amidst jealous and often warring communities and creeds, established new standards of tolerance and integrity, and raised the whole of India to a higher plane of material prosperity and of moral and intellectual development. They spend the best part of their lives in an exile which cuts them off from most of the amenities of social existence at home, and often involves the more or less prolonged sacrifice of the happiest family ties. Those especially whose work lies chiefly in the remote rural districts, far away from the few cities in which European conditions of life to some extent prevail, are brought daily into the very closest contact with the people, and because of their absolute detachment from the prejudices and passions and material interests by which Indian society, like all other societies, is largely swayed, they enjoy the confidence of the people often in a higher degree than Indian officials whose detachment can never be so complete. Their task has been to administer well and to do the best in their power for the welfare of the population committed to their charge. The Englishman, as a rule, sticks to his own job. The British administrator's job had been to administer, and he had not yet been told that it was also his job to train up a nation on democratic lines and to instil into them the principles of civic duty as such duty is understood in Western countries. No doubt there were British administrators in India whose innate conservatism, coupled with the narrowness which years of routine work and official self-confidence are apt to breed, revolted against any transfer of power to, or any recognition of equality with, the people of the country they had spent their lives in ruling with unquestioned but, as they at least conceived it, paternal authority. The conditions of bureaucratic rule inevitably tended to produce an autocratic temper. But it was not merely in obedience to that temper that they shrank from any changes that would weaken the administration; the best of them at least had a strong sense of their responsibilities as guardians and protectors of the simple and ignorant masses committed to their care. They might be inclined to judge the Western-educated class of Indians too harshly, and to identify them too closely with the type that was beginning to dominate the Indian National Congress, but the form in which the question of yielding to Indians any substantial part of their authority presented itself to their minds was by no means an entirely selfish one. "Are we justified," they asked, "in transferring our responsibilities for the welfare and good government of such a large section of the human race to a small minority which has hitherto shown so little disposition to approach any of the difficult problems with the solution of which the happiness and progress of the overwhelming majority of their own race are bound up, though, because themselves belonging to the same stock and the same social system, it would have been much easier for them to deal with those problems than it is for alien rulers like ourselves? Those problems arise out of the social system which is known as Hinduism—for Hinduism is much more a social than a religious system. Western-educated Indians will not openly deny its evils—the iron-bound principle of caste, which, in spite of many concessions in non-essentials to modern exigencies of convenience, remains almost untouched in all essentials and, above all, in the fundamental laws of inter-marriage, the social outlawry of scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated as 'untouchable,' infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so forth. How many of the Western-educated Indians who have thrown themselves into political agitation against the tyranny of the British bureaucracy have ever raised a finger to free their own fellow-countrymen from the tyranny of those social evils? How many of them are entirely free from it themselves, or, if free, have the courage to act up to their opinions? At one time—before the Congress gave precedence to political reforms—social reform did find many enthusiastic supporters amongst the best class of Western-educated Indians, but the gradual disappearance of men of that type may be said almost to coincide with the growth of political agitation. There have been, and there still are, some notable and admirable exceptions, but they are seldom to be found amongst the men who claim to be the tribunes of the Indian people. It is on these grounds—moral rather than political—that we claim to be still the best judges of our duties as trustees for the people of India."

This was perhaps the most forcible of the British administrator's arguments, and it was an honest one. Another was that the Western-educated Indians were mainly drawn from the towns and from a narrow circle of professional classes in the towns, who could not therefore speak on behalf of and still less control the destinies of a vast population, overwhelmingly agricultural, regarding whose interests they had hitherto shown themselves both ignorant and indifferent, and from whom the very education which constituted their main title to consideration had tended to separate and estrange them. The land-owning gentry and the peasantry had so far scarcely been touched by this political agitation. The peasantry knew little or nothing of its existence. The land-owners feared it, for, having themselves for the most part kept aloof from modern education, and shrinking instinctively from the limelight of political controversies and such electioneering competitions as they had already been drawn into for municipal and local government purposes, they felt themselves hopelessly handicapped in a struggle that threatened their traditional prestige and authority as well as their material interests. What they dreaded most of all was the ascendancy of the lawyer class in this new political movement—the Vakil-Raj, as they called it—for they had in many instances already been made to feel how heavy the hand of the lawyer could be upon them in a country so prone to litigation as India, and endowed with so costly and complicated a system of jurisprudence and procedure, if they ventured to place themselves in opposition to the political aspirations of ambitious lawyers. Above all, the British administrator, who rightly held the maintenance of a strict balance between the different creeds and communities of India to be an essential part of his mission, felt strong in the undivided support which his conception of his responsibilities and duties received from the Mahomedans of India. Then, and almost into the second decade of this century, a community forming a fifth of the whole population professed itself absolutely opposed to any surrender of British authority which, it was convinced, would enure solely to the benefit of its hated Hindu rivals, far more supple and far more advanced in all knowledge of the West, including political agitation. The Mahomedans had held aloof from the Congress. They still had no definite political organisation of their own; they were content with the British raj and wanted nothing else.

The British administrator was therefore not altogether unwarranted in his conviction that in standing in the ancient ways he had behind him not only the tacit assent of the inarticulate masses but the positive support of very important classes and communities. He knew also that he had with him, besides unofficial European opinion in India, almost solid on his side, the sympathy, however vague and uninformed, of the bulk of his own countrymen at home, represented for a great part of the fifty years now under review by a succession of conservative parliaments and governments. There were no longer, as in the East India Company days, periodical inquests into the state of India to wind up Parliament to a concert pitch of sustained and vigilant interest in Indian affairs. The very few legislators who exhibited any persistent curiosity about Indian administration were regarded for the most part as cranks or bores, and the annual statement on the Indian budget was usually made before almost empty benches. Only questions that raised large issues of foreign policy, such as Afghan expeditions and the Russian menace in Asia Minor, or that affected the considerable commercial interests at home, like the Indian cotton duties or currency and exchange, would intermittently stir British public opinion inside and outside Parliament, and these often chiefly as occasions for party warfare. Ministers themselves appeared to be mainly concerned with the part which India had to play in their general scheme of Imperial and Asiatic policy rather than with the methods by which India was governed. These could be safely left to "the man on the spot."

Very different had been the spirit in which British parliaments and governments had discharged their responsibilities before the transfer of India to the Crown, and rude was the awakening for the British administrator in India and for British ministers at home when the explosion that followed the Partition of Bengal revealed a very different India that was in process of evolution with much and dangerous travail out of the reaction of new forces, hitherto almost unobserved, upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as negligible quantities.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A detailed and learned study of these movements is found in Dr. J.N. Farquhar's Modern Religious Movements in India, published by the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915.



CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST

Amongst the Western-educated classes the new forces which had been turning the minds of young India towards Swaraj as the watchword of national unity and independence had drawn much of their inspiration from text-books which taught them how large a share Nationalism had played in redeeming modern nations from alien oppression and in shaping the whole political evolution of Europe. It had emancipated the Balkan States from the alien thraldom of the Ottoman Sultans; it had helped to unify Italy and Germany; it had been a potent if less apparent factor in welding Great Britain and the distant colonies peopled by the British race into a great British Empire. Had not Indians also a common nationhood which, despite all racial and religious differences, could be traced back across centuries of internal strife and foreign domination to a period, remote indeed but none the less enviable, when they had been their own masters? Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest barriers to India's national unity—the multiplicity of her vernaculars—by giving English to the Western-educated classes as a common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National Congress itself would have been an impossibility? Great events, moreover, had been happening quite recently which tended to shake the Indians' belief in the irresistible superiority of Western civilisation even in its material aspects. The disaster inflicted upon an Italian army at Adowa in 1894 by the Abyssinians—a backward African people scarcely known except for the ease with which a British expedition had chastised them not thirty years before—was perhaps the first of these events to awaken observant Indians to the fact that European arms were not necessarily invincible. The resistance put up for nearly three years by two small South African Republics, strong chiefly in their indomitable pride of nationhood, seemed to have strained the resources even of the British Empire, and Japan, an Asiatic power only recently emerged from obscurity, had just proved on land and sea that an Asiatic nation in possession of her national independence could equip herself to meet and overcome one of the greatest of European powers—one whose vast ambitions constituted in the eyes of generations of British statesmen a grave menace to the safety of India itself. Was England really mightier than Russia? Had she not also perhaps feet of clay? Was British rule to endure for ever? Was it not a weak point in England's armour that she had to rely not a little on Indian troops, whom she still treated as mercenaries, to fight her battles even in such distant countries as China and the Sudan, and upon still more numerous legions of Indians in every branch of the civil administration to carry out all the menial work of government? If the Indians, untrained, and indeed forbidden, to bear arms, were unable at once to overthrow British rule, could they not at least paralyse its machinery, as Bepin Chandra Pal was preaching, by refusing to take any kind of service under it?

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 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.

Another and worthier preoccupation was the impending visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India. King Edward's son was to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had for the first time made a Royal progress through the Indian Empire nearly thirty years before. His progress had been a triumphal one at a period when the internal and external peace of India seemed equally profound. That of his son was no less triumphal, though India was just entering on a period of political unrest undreamt of in the preceding generation. Even in Calcutta, which had been seething with agitation a few weeks before, the Prince and Princess were received not only with loyal acclamations but almost with god-like worship; and all these demonstrations were perfectly genuine. For with the curious inconsistency which pervades all Indian speculations religious and political, though countless dynasties have fallen and countless rulers have come to a violent end in the chequered annals of Indian history, nothing has ever destroyed the ancient conception of royalty as partaking of the divine essence. The remoteness of the Western rulers under whose sceptre India had passed lent if anything an added mystery and majesty to the royalty they wielded. Even the avowed enemies of British rule seldom levelled their shafts at the Throne. That the King can do no wrong is a saying that appealed to the Indian mind long before the Western-educated classes grasped its real meaning under a constitutional monarchy, and began to extend its application even to the King's Government for the purpose of conveniently discriminating between the British Government, whose good intentions were generally assumed, and the autocratic Government of India, whence all mischief sprang. During the whole of the Royal tour, which extended to all the major provinces of British India and to several of the Native States, the enthusiasm was general, and even the Extremists did not venture a discordant note. The Prince and Princess, whose graciousness never wearied, moved freely amongst the crowds, and the presence of the future Queen appealed strongly to the women of India, whose influence we are apt to underrate because until recently it has been exercised almost exclusively in the seclusion of the zenana. Even high-caste ladies, Hindus as well as Mahomedans, were known on this occasion for the first time perhaps in their lives to pass beyond the outer gates of their houses in order to attend a Royal reception—with all the precautions of course that have always to be taken to shelter a purdah party from any contact with the other sex.

It became the fashion for all classes to draw their own happy auguries from the Royal visit, but to none did it seem so auspicious as to the politically-minded Indians. For it coincided with the sweeping defeat of the Unionist party at the general election of 1905 and the return to office of a Liberal Government with a crushing majority behind it, whom the hostility displayed by the Liberal party towards Lord Curzon's administration on almost every Indian question save that which had brought about his resignation seemed to pledge to a prompt reversal of his policy. Was not the appointment to the India Office of such a stalwart Radical as Mr. John Morley, who had been Gladstone's Home Rule Secretary for Ireland, enough to justify the expectation that the right of India, if not to Home Rule, to a large measure of enfranchisement would receive prompt recognition? If Indians could hardly regard Lord Curzon's successor as another Ripon, their first impression of Lord Minto satisfied them that, though the Conservative nominee of Mr. Balfour's Government, the new Viceroy was neither disposed to tread in his predecessor's footsteps as an autocratic administrator nor likely to carry sufficient weight at home to stand in the way of a Secretary of State who, like many Radical doctrinaires, was essentially what the French call un homme d'autorite. The event proved that they were right in their estimate of Lord Minto, but wrong in their sanguine expectation that Mr. Morley would at once break with the old principles of Indian government or even with Lord Curzon's administrative methods. Bengal remained partitioned. It was a chose jugee which Mr. Morley was not prepared to reopen.

The disillusionment in India was much greater than after the fiasco of the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India. Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not despair of bringing constitutional methods of agitation to bear upon British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National Congress, which they had founded twenty years before, was sliding rapidly down the inclined plane which was to lead first to open and violent discord and later on to disruption. Even before the Partition the Moderates could make but a poor reply to those who jeered at the paltry results which had attended their practice of constitutional forms of agitation. For if the Indian Councils Act of 1892 had opened the doors of the Viceroy's Legislative Assembly to some of the most distinguished among them, what had it profited them? The official benches merely gave a courteous hearing to the incisive criticisms proceeding from men of such undisputed capacity as Mehta and Gokhale and bore less patiently with the Ciceronian periods of the great Bengalee tribune Surendranath Banerjee. Government paid little or no heed to them. Equally powerless had been their passionate protest against the Partition. Even had they not been in complete sympathy with popular feeling, they would have been compelled to voice it or surrender the leadership they still hoped to retain to the new Extremist party which, under Mr. Tilak's leadership, was carrying his doctrines and his methods far beyond the limits of the Deccan. Each annual session of the Congress grew more turbulent and the Moderates gave ground each year, until at the famous Surat session of 1907 they realised that they had to make a definite stand or go under. There the storm burst over the preliminary proceedings before the real issues were reached. Mr. Tilak's followers assailed the presidential platform of which the Moderates had still retained possession, and the Congress broke up in hopeless confusion and disorder.

But what happened in the Congress was but a pale reflection of what was happening outside. The Partition was indeed little more than the signal for an explosion, not merely in Bengal, of which premonitory indications had been witnessed, but had passed almost unheeded, some ten years earlier in the Deccan. The cry of Swaraj was caught up and re-echoed in every province of British India. In Calcutta the vow of Swadeshi was administered at mass meetings in the famous temple of Kali. Hindu reactionaries, whose conception of a well-ordered society had not moved beyond the laws of Manu, fell into line for the moment with the intellectual products of the modern Indian University. Hindu ascetics appealed to the credulity of the masses and every Bar Association became the centre of an active political propaganda on a Western democratic model. Schoolboys and students were exhorted to abandon their studies and go out into the streets, where they qualified as patriots by marching in the van of national demonstrations for Swaraj or by furnishing picketing parties for the Swadeshi boycott. The native press, whether printed in the vernacular tongues or in the language of the British tyrant, reached the extreme limits of licence, and when it did not actually preach violence it succeeded in producing the atmosphere which engenders violence. When passions were wrought up to a white heat by fiery orators and still more fiery newspaper writers, who knew how to draw equally effectively on the ancient legends of Hindu mythology and on the contemporary records of Russian anarchism, the cult of the bomb was easily grafted on to the cult of Shiva, the Destroyer, and murders, of which the victims were almost as often Indians in Government service as British-born officials, were invested with a halo of religious and patriotic heroism. Youths even of the better classes banded themselves together to collect patriotic funds by plunder and violence, and revived those old forms of lawlessness which had been rampant in pre-British days under the name of dacoity. Schools and colleges were found to be honeycombed with secret societies, and a flood of light was suddenly thrown on the disastrous workings of an educational system that had been slowly perverted to such ends under the very eyes of the Government that was supposed to direct and control it.

Lord Curzon had held a special conference at Simla in 1900 "to consider the system of education in India," but not a single Indian and only one non-official European had been invited to take part in it. It was the intellectual shortcomings of the system with which he was concerned, and the chief outcome of that conference and of a Commission subsequently appointed to carry on the inquiry was the Universities Act of 1904, carried in the face of bitter Indian opposition. Even such broad-minded and experienced Indians as Gokhale and Mehta suspected the Viceroy of a desire to hamper the growth of higher Western education on political grounds. But throughout the four years' controversy Government never betrayed an inkling of the appalling extent to which inferior secondary education had been allowed to degenerate in second-and third-rate schools with second-and third-rate masters into a mere teaching machine, clumsy and imperfect at that, for the passing of examinations that tested memory rather than intelligence, and character least of all. The unfortunate youths who could not stand even that test were left hopelessly stranded on the road, equally disqualified for a humbler sphere of life which they had learnt to despise and for the higher walks to which they had vainly aspired. Soured by defeat, and easily persuaded to impute it solely to the alien rulers responsible for a system which had led them merely into a blind alley, they formed the rank and file of a proletariat that could only by courtesy be called intellectual, but was just the material out of which every form of discontent is apt to breed desperadoes. But many were no mere vulgar desperadoes. Amongst those who were engaged in making bombs and collecting revolvers and organising dacoities or who actually committed murder not a few sincerely believed that they were risking or giving their lives in a great patriotic and religious cause. The Yugantar, their chief Bengalee organ, which had an enormous circulation and sold often at fancy prices in the streets of Calcutta, was written, according to a statement made in the High Court by the Government translator whose business it was to study it, in language so lofty, so pathetic, so stirring that he found it impossible to convey it into English. The writers made no secret of their purpose. The young Indian's "mind must be excited and maddened by such an ideal as will present to him a picture of everlasting salvation." Murder had its creed to which Dr. Farquhar assigns a definite place in his Modern Religious Movements in India with the following as its chief dogmas:

Indian civilisation in all its branches,—religion, education, art, industry, home life and government,—is healthy, spiritual, beautiful and good. It has become corrupted in the course of centuries, but that is largely the result of the cruelty and aggression of the Muhammadans in former times and now of the British. The Indian patriot must toil to restore Indian life and civilisation.

Western civilisation in all its parts,—religion, education, art, business and government,—is gross, materialistic and therefore degrading to India. The patriotic Indian must recognise the grave danger lurking in every element of Western influence, must hate it, and must be on his guard against it.

India ought to be made truly Indian. There is no place for Europeans in the country. Indians can manage everything far better than Europeans can. The British Government, Missions, European trade and Western influence of every kind, are altogether unhealthy in India. Everything should belong to the Indians themselves.

Hence it is a religious duty to get rid of the European and all the evils that attend him. The better a man understands his religion, the more clear will be his perception that Europeans and European influence must be rooted out. All means for the attainment of this end are justifiable. As Krishna killed Kamsa, so the modern Indian must kill the European demons that are tyrannically holding India down. The bloodthirsty goddess Kali ought to be honoured by the Indian patriot. Even the Baghavad Ghita was used to teach murder. Lies, deceit, murder, everything, it was argued, may be rightly used.

Not till some years later did a Committee, presided over by a British High Court judge sent out from England for the purpose, fully explore the many ramifications of a revolutionary movement which had one of its head centres in London, until the murder of Sir W. Curzon-Wylie by an Indian student during a crowded reception at the Imperial Institute aroused the attention of the authorities to the activities of the "India House," and Mr. Krishnavarma, its familiar genius, had to transfer to Paris his notorious paper, the Indian Sociologist, in which he openly glorified murder. The "Sedition Committee's" Report was only made public in 1918, and if the action taken upon it by the Government of India was to furnish the occasion for another popular explosion different in character from, but no less formidable than, the explosion which followed the Partition of Bengal, the facts which it marshalled and the conclusions which it drew from them with judicial soberness have never been seriously challenged. It found that the long series of crimes of which it recorded the genesis and growth had been "directed towards one and the same objective, the overthrow by force of British rule in India," and nothing revealed more clearly the mainspring of the movement than the statistics given as to age, caste, and occupation of persons who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst committing them. The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age; most of them students and teachers; all of them Hindus, and almost all high-caste Hindus, either Brahmans or Kayasthas—the latter a writer-caste ranking just below the Brahman caste. These statistics did not cover the large number of crimes of which the authors escaped scot-free and were never brought to justice.

Not the least alarming feature of the situation was the attitude of the Indian public generally towards this epidemic of political crime which assumed some forms hitherto quite unknown to India and abhorrent to most Indians. The movement could only be correctly described as an Anarchist movement in so far as the methods to which it resorted were largely modelled upon those of Russian anarchists and aimed, like theirs, at the subversion of the existing Government. It differed fundamentally from Russian anarchism in that it was directed against alien rulers of another faith and another civilisation. That it created a widespread feeling of apprehension and even of detestation amongst the great majority of peaceful and sober-minded Indians cannot be doubted, and especially amongst those who watched with alarm the ravages it was making amongst the younger generation. But few had the courage to carry reprobation to the length of assisting Government in the detection and repression of crimes which terrorism made it less dangerous to extenuate as lamentable exhibitions of a misguided patriotic frenzy. The Western-educated classes were completely estranged and smarted so bitterly over the contempt with which their representations and protests against the policy of Government had been treated that those even of the more moderate school of politics were content to throw up their hands in horror and declare that if they were unable to stem the torrent, the fault lay entirely with the bureaucracy which had killed by long years of neglect and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress. The Extremists boldly threw the whole responsibility for the movement on British rule and combined with a perfunctory and dubious condemnation of the crimes themselves an ecstatic admiration for the heroism which had driven the youth of India to follow the example of the Russian intelligentsia in its revolt against an autocracy as brutal and as odious as that of Russia. Mere measures of repression under the ordinary law were clearly incapable of coping with a situation which was becoming no less dangerous in its negative than in its positive aspects. British rule in India had concentrated so largely on mechanical efficiency that it had gradually lost sight of the old and finer principles of Anglo-Indian as well as of British statesmanship based on the paramount importance 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 State agreed reluctantly to sanction more stringent legislation for dealing with the excesses of the Extremist press in India, but he was only the more resolved that it must be accompanied by a liberal reforms scheme. The Viceroy himself shared this view and lent willing assistance. But the interchange of opinions between India and Whitehall was as usual terribly lengthy and laborious. A Royal Proclamation on November 28, 1908, the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's Proclamation after the Mutiny, foreshadowed reforms in "political satisfaction of the claims of important classes representing ideas that have been fostered and encouraged by British rule." But not till the following month, i.e. three years after Mr. Morley had taken over the India Office, did the reforms scheme see the light of day.

It bore his impress. He had a ready ear for Indian grievances and much understanding for the Moderate Indian point of view. He was prepared to give Indians a larger consultative voice in the conduct of Indian affairs, and even to introduce individual Indians not only into his own Council at Whitehall but even into the Viceroy's Executive Council, the citadel of British authority in India. He was determined to enforce far more energetically than most of his predecessors the constitutional right of the Secretary of State to form and lay down the policy for which his responsibility was to the British Parliament alone, while the function of the Government of India was, after making to him whatever representations it might deem desirable, to carry his decisions faithfully and fully into execution. He was prepared to exercise also to the full his right to control the administrative as well as the executive acts of the Government of India and its officers. He was not prepared to devolve upon Indians collectively any part of the constitutional powers vested in the Indian Executive and ultimately through the Secretary of State in the British Parliament. He was not therefore prepared to give India any representative institutions that should circumscribe or share the power of the Indian Executive. The Indian Councils Act of 1909 was drawn up on those lines. It enlarged the membership and the functions of the Indian Legislative Councils, and placed them definitely on an elective basis without doing away altogether with nominations by Government. The only point upon which Mr. Morley yielded to pressure was in conceding the principle of community representation in favour of the Mahomedans, to whom, at a time when they not only held rigidly aloof from all political agitation but professed great anxiety as to political concessions of which the benefit would, they submitted, accrue mainly to the Hindus, Lord Minto had given a promise that in any future reforms scheme full consideration should be given to the historical importance and actual influence of their community rather than to its mere numerical strength.

The Indian Councils Act, 1909, fell considerably short of the demands put forward even by the founders of the Congress five-and-twenty years before, as the new Councils, greatly enlarged, were still to be merely consultative assemblies. But it did for the first time admit "the living forces of the elective principle," and to that extent it met the demand for representative institutions. Indian Moderates could point also to the presence of an Indian member, Sir Satyendra (now Lord) Sinha, in the Viceroy's Executive Council and of two Indian members in the Secretary of State's Council at Whitehall as a definite proof that India would have henceforth a hearing before, and not as in the past merely after, the adoption of vital lines of policy. The Act was accepted by the Moderate leaders as a genuine if not a generous instalment of reform, and it restored to some extent their influence as the advocates of constitutional progress by showing that the British Government had not been altogether deaf to their appeals. It did not of course satisfy the Extremists, but their influence had suffered a great set-back from the wrecking of the Surat Congress, their great Deccanee leader was working out a long term of imprisonment at Mandalay, and with the tide of anarchism still spreading and visibly demoralising the student class all over India, even to the undermining of parental authority, the first feeling of suppressed and largely inarticulate alarm and resentment developed into a definite reaction in favour of government as by law established.

The great wave of unrest which had swept over India was already subsiding when Lord Minto left India in 1910 amidst genuine demonstrations of returning goodwill, and the appointment of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst as his successor was welcomed in the same spirit, not because Lord Kitchener, who had run him very hard for the Viceroyalty, was personally unpopular in India, but because he owed to reactionary supporters the quite unmerited reputation of being "the man with the big stick."

The visit of the King and Queen to India at the end of 1911 was therefore well timed, and it provoked a still greater outburst of popular enthusiasm than their visit as Prince and Princess of Wales in 1905. For it was the first time that the Sovereign to whom it was given to rule over India from a remote Western island travelled out to receive on Indian soil the homage of his Indian subjects and appeared before them in the full majesty of crown, orb, and sceptre. Apart entirely from the merits of the measure, the dramatic transfer of the capital of his Indian Empire from Calcutta to Delhi appealed to the imagination of Indians as a demonstration of the Royal power no less impressive than the splendours of the great Durbar at which the Royal command went forth. Equally did their Majesties fulfil another of the time-honoured conceptions of royalty by knowing, so to say, when to step down from their throne and mix freely with the people. It has been from times immemorial one of the principles of Indian rulership that the ruler cannot deny to his subjects the privilege of access to his person, and many are those who have gained more popularity by giving ample opportunity to their subjects for stating to them their grievances in the royal presence than by ever actually redressing them. In Calcutta especially when the King and Queen moved cheerfully amongst the delirious crowds that had thronged to the Maidan to worship them, the scene surpassed all previous experiences. For had not one of the measures announced as the Royal will at the Delhi Durbar been the revision at last of Lord Curzon's detested Partition of Bengal? The furious agitation of the first few years had broken in vain against the dead wall of the chose jugee which Mr. Morley had upheld, and it had gradually died down. The wound, however, had been still there, and now the King's hand had touched and healed it. The old Province of Bengal was not indeed restored within its former limits, but Eastern Bengal, created as the Hindu Bengalees believed, in favour of Mahomedan ascendancy, disappeared, and in its stead Behar and Orissa, where a large part of the population was of a different stock and spoke a different tongue, were detached to the west and south of Bengal proper and formed into a separate province which served equally well to relieve administrative congestion without doing violence to Bengalee sentiment.

On the very first anniversary, however, of the day of the great Delhi Durbar an audacious attempt to murder the Viceroy at the moment when he was making his solemn entry into the new capital came as a painful reminder that the fangs of Indian anarchism had not yet been drawn. From one of the balconies of the Chandni Chauk, the chief thoroughfare of the native city, a bomb was thrown at Lord Hardinge who was riding with Lady Hardinge on a State elephant, in accordance with Indian usage, on his way to the Fort where he was to have delivered a message of greeting to the people of India recalling the memorable results of the Royal visit. The Viceroy was severely wounded and Lady Hardinge, though she escaped without any apparent hurt, suffered a shock which at least hastened her premature death two and a half years later. Lord Hardinge had already earned the widespread confidence of Indians by his undisguised sympathy with all their legitimate aspirations, and the Lady Hardinge's School of Medicine for Indian women stands now at Delhi as an enduring monument, not only of the keen interest which she took in the cause of Indian womanhood and in everything that could tend to its advancement, but of the affection she had won by a rare charm of manner that was, with her, merely the outward reflection of a gentle and finely tempered nature. There had been abortive plots against Lord Minto's life, but it had been deemed politic to minimise their importance. This, however, was an attempt too flagrant and too nearly fatal to be disguised or denied, and a thrill of horror which hushed even the Extremists went through the whole of India, for to the office of the Viceroy as the personal representative of the sovereign there had always hitherto attached something of the sanctity with which, according to Indian beliefs, all kingship is invested. All the more grateful was the response elicited by the assurance which Lord Hardinge hastened to convey from his sick-bed that what had happened could and would in no way diminish his affection and devotion to the people of India or modify the policy of goodwill and progress for which he stood. Neither he nor India ever forgot that assurance.

Unfortunately the artificial basis upon which the Morley-Minto reforms had been built revealed itself very soon under the searching test of practical experience. The Councils Act of 1909 had made no attempt to organise on an effective and genuine basis "the living forces of the elective principle." The indirect system of election established under the Act could only produce haphazard and misleading results. An indirect chain of elections afforded no means of appraising the true relationship between the elected members of the Councils and their original electors. The qualifications of candidates, as well as of electors, varied widely from province to province, but shared one common characteristic, that the election was more often a matter of form. Members of the Provincial Councils were returned partly by Municipal and Local Boards arranged in various groups, without any connection with, or mandate from, the constituencies by which these bodies had been chosen, partly by a land-holding community which did not consider itself bound by the acts of its constituted representatives. The so-called electorates were never known to give definite mandates to those who professed to represent them or to pronounce upon any course of action which their representatives might pursue. Nobody knew what was the numerical foundation on which an elected member took his seat. It was almost impossible to trace it back along the chain of indirect elections. Before the British Reform Bill of 1832 much play was made of pocket boroughs of twenty or thirty electors. In India, one constituency electing a member to the Imperial Legislative Council numbered exactly seven, and there were cases where the representation was pretty well known to have been divided by agreement between two individuals. Nor did the recommendations of a Royal Commission on Decentralisation avail to break down that spirit of over-centralisation which had of late years marked the policy of the Government of India. The Provincial Governments still remained bound hand and foot by the necessity of constant reference to the Central Government, while the latter in its turn was forced to make an ever-increasing number of references to Whitehall, where Mr. Morley enforced, far beyond the practice of any previous Secretary of State, the principle that the Provincial Governments were responsible to the Central Government, and the Central Government to the India Office for every detail of administration.

More galling to Indians was it to have to admit that the expansion of Indian representation in the Councils had not been followed by any visible increase of Indian control over the conduct of public affairs. Whilst disclaiming warmly any intention of paving the way for the introduction of parliamentary institutions into India, Mr. Morley had allowed an illusory semblance of parliamentary institutions to be introduced into the enlarged Councils by requiring their sanction for legislative measures brought forward by the Executive. The latter had to go through the same forms of procedure as if its existence depended upon the support of a parliamentary majority to which it was responsible, whereas it continued to be irremovable and responsible only to the Secretary of State. These were in fact mere empty forms, for however unpalatable any measure might be to the Indian members, or however powerful their arguments against it, Government could always vote the Indian opposition down in the Viceroy's Legislative Council, the most important of all, by mustering the official majority in full force to deliver their votes according to instructions. In the Provincial Councils on the other hand in which an unofficial majority had been conceded, the Indian members were in a position to create a deadlock by refusing to vote for measures indispensable to the proper conduct of Government; but whilst the power they could thus exercise might go far enough to paralyse the Executive, they had no power to turn it out. These new Councils had been invested with large but mostly negative powers, and with no positive responsibilities.

For a time the sentiment of trust which underlay the granting of the reforms had its effect. Both sides seemed to display a more conciliatory spirit and the relations between the official and unofficial benches in the enlarged Councils assumed a more friendly character. In many cases the influence of the non-official members was successfully exerted to secure modifications in the legislative measures of Government, though from a mistaken desire to "save its face" Government too often preferred to make concessions at private conferences with the Indian leaders rather than as the outcome of public discussion, and lost thereby a good deal of the credit which it might have secured by a more open display of its desire to meet Indian objections. On some occasions before the war the pressure of Indian opinion even deterred Provincial Governments from introducing legislative measures which they considered essential to public safety because they apprehended defeat at the hands of the unofficial majority in the legislative Councils. But the Indian public remained generally in ignorance of the extent to which the influence of the Indian representatives made itself felt, either for good or for evil, on Government. The bureaucracy, more secretive in India than elsewhere, had never realised the importance of guiding public opinion, or, a fortiori, the necessity of keeping it informed if you wish to guide it. The politicians, on the other hand, preferred to make capital out of those questions on which they failed to make any impression upon Government, though the real difficulty very often lay in the rigidity of the statutory control exercised by the Central Government over Provincial Governments, and by Whitehall over the Central Government. The inevitable consequences soon became clear. The enlarged Indian representation appeared to have less power than it really enjoyed, and, having no responsibility whatever, it was free to make its own bids for popularity with constituencies equally irresponsible. Resolutions were introduced which, if they could have carried them, the unofficial members would often have been much puzzled to carry into effect, and grievances were voiced which, even when well founded, it was frequently beyond the power of any Government to remedy. On the other hand, the Executive was threatened with the possibility of a complete deadlock, and the concessions by which it could be averted often alarmed not merely the innate conservatism of the official world but many Indian interests scarcely less conservative.

Not till after Mr. Morley had been raised to the peerage and Lord Crewe had succeeded him at the India Office was anything done to meet the demand of the Western-educated classes for a larger share in the administrative work of the country or to redress the very reasonable grievances of Indians employed in the Government services who were still for the most part penned up in the Provincial Services as established on the recommendations of the Aitcheson Committee more than twenty-five years earlier. In 1912 a Royal Commission went out to India with Lord Islington as Chairman. It was a body on which the British element in the Indian Public Services was only represented by a small minority, and amongst the European members Lord Ronaldshay and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, both then in the House of Commons, stood for widely different schools of politics. Of the three Indian members, Mr. Gokhale, who had become one of the most influential leaders of the Moderate party, carried by far the greatest weight, and his premature death before the Commission completed its Report seriously impaired its usefulness. It spent two successive winters in taking a mass of evidence from Indians and Europeans all over India, but its sittings held, except in very rare cases, in public served chiefly at the time to stir up Indian opinion by bringing into sharp relief the profound divergencies between the Indian and the Anglo-Indian point of view, and in a form which on the one hand, unfortunately, was bound to offend Indian susceptibilities, and on the other hand was apt to produce the impression that Indians were chiefly concerned to substitute an indigenous for an alien bureaucracy. Anyhow, while the Western-educated classes were rapidly coming to the conclusion that the Minto-Morley reforms had given them the shadow rather than the substance of political power, they saw in the proceedings of the Public Services Commission little indication of any radical change in the attitude of the British official classes towards the question of training up the people of India to a larger share in the administration.