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