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?