which they saw, moreover, very little need, but the
ending of British rule in India. Equal divergencies
occurred in Indian public opinion. An Extremist
gathering in Madras declared roundly that “the
scheme is so radically wrong in principle and in detail
that in our opinion it is impossible to modify or
improve it.” In vain had Mrs. Besant been
released from her modern oubliette before Mr.
Montagu started for India. “The scheme,”
she wrote in her haste, on the very day of its publication,
“is unworthy to be offered by England or to be
accepted by India.” In vain had Mr. Montagu
allowed himself to be garlanded by Mr. Tilak, who
was not far behind Mrs. Besant in pronouncing the
scheme to be “entirely unacceptable.”
The Calcutta Provincial Conference of the Congress
party held a few days later abounded in the same sense,
and a special session of the whole Congress convoked
in August in Bombay was only in form somewhat less
bitterly uncompromising, and only because it began
to realise that the secession of the more moderate
elements was likely to reduce “the Parliament
of India” to a mere rump. Moderate opinion
had not committed itself to acceptance of the scheme
as precipitately as the Extremists to its rejection,
but against rejection pure and simple it set its face
at once, and it rallied so steadily and surely to
acceptance that few of the Moderates attended the
Provincial Congress, where they were promptly howled
down, and they determined to hold a Conference of their
own in opposition to the special Congress session.
At this Conference, as well as in the Committee of
non-official members of the Indian Legislative Council,
there was a good deal of disjointed criticism of various
recommendations in the Report, not infrequently due
to misunderstanding of their import, but on the whole
it was recognised as representing a great triumph
for the cause of political progress on constitutional
lines and therefore for the educated opinion of India.
The breach between the Extremists and the Moderates
was clearly defined by Mr. B.L. Mitter, a prominent
Moderate of Calcutta and a member of the new Moderate
organisation, the “National Liberal League”:
The Extremists would have nothing to do with the English in the Government or outside; the Moderates consider co-operation with the English necessary for national development, political, industrial, economic, and otherwise. The Extremists would straightway assume full responsibility of Government; the Moderates think that would lead to chaos, and would proceed by stages. It is the difference between cataclysm and evolution. The Extremists’ ideal is destruction of the existing order of things in the hope that something better will take its place, for nothing can be worse than what is; the Moderates’ ideal is formation of a new order of things on definite progressive lines. One is chance, the other is design. The primary difference (so far as methods are concerned) is that the Extremists’ method is not necessarily