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.