Lord Curzon had held a special conference at Simla in 1900 “to consider the system of education in India,” but not a single Indian and only one non-official European had been invited to take part in it.  It was the intellectual shortcomings of the system with which he was concerned, and the chief outcome of that conference and of a Commission subsequently appointed to carry on the inquiry was the Universities Act of 1904, carried in the face of bitter Indian opposition.  Even such broad-minded and experienced Indians as Gokhale and Mehta suspected the Viceroy of a desire to hamper the growth of higher Western education on political grounds.  But throughout the four years’ controversy Government never betrayed an inkling of the appalling extent to which inferior secondary education had been allowed to degenerate in second-and third-rate schools with second-and third-rate masters into a mere teaching machine, clumsy and imperfect at that, for the passing of examinations that tested memory rather than intelligence, and character least of all.  The unfortunate youths who could not stand even that test were left hopelessly stranded on the road, equally disqualified for a humbler sphere of life which they had learnt to despise and for the higher walks to which they had vainly aspired.  Soured by defeat, and easily persuaded to impute it solely to the alien rulers responsible for a system which had led them merely into a blind alley, they formed the rank and file of a proletariat that could only by courtesy be called intellectual, but was just the material out of which every form of discontent is apt to breed desperadoes.  But many were no mere vulgar desperadoes.  Amongst those who were engaged in making bombs and collecting revolvers and organising dacoities or who actually committed murder not a few sincerely believed that they were risking or giving their lives in a great patriotic and religious cause.  The Yugantar, their chief Bengalee organ, which had an enormous circulation and sold often at fancy prices in the streets of Calcutta, was written, according to a statement made in the High Court by the Government translator whose business it was to study it, in language so lofty, so pathetic, so stirring that he found it impossible to convey it into English.  The writers made no secret of their purpose.  The young Indian’s “mind must be excited and maddened by such an ideal as will present to him a picture of everlasting salvation.”  Murder had its creed to which Dr. Farquhar assigns a definite place in his Modern Religious Movements in India with the following as its chief dogmas: