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.