statistics given as to age, caste, and occupation of persons who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst committing them.  The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age; most of them students and teachers; all of them Hindus, and almost all high-caste Hindus, either Brahmans or Kayasthas—­the latter a writer-caste ranking just below the Brahman caste.  These statistics did not cover the large number of crimes of which the authors escaped scot-free and were never brought to justice.

Not the least alarming feature of the situation was the attitude of the Indian public generally towards this epidemic of political crime which assumed some forms hitherto quite unknown to India and abhorrent to most Indians.  The movement could only be correctly described as an Anarchist movement in so far as the methods to which it resorted were largely modelled upon those of Russian anarchists and aimed, like theirs, at the subversion of the existing Government.  It differed fundamentally from Russian anarchism in that it was directed against alien rulers of another faith and another civilisation.  That it created a widespread feeling of apprehension and even of detestation amongst the great majority of peaceful and sober-minded Indians cannot be doubted, and especially amongst those who watched with alarm the ravages it was making amongst the younger generation.  But few had the courage to carry reprobation to the length of assisting Government in the detection and repression of crimes which terrorism made it less dangerous to extenuate as lamentable exhibitions of a misguided patriotic frenzy.  The Western-educated classes were completely estranged and smarted so bitterly over the contempt with which their representations and protests against the policy of Government had been treated that those even of the more moderate school of politics were content to throw up their hands in horror and declare that if they were unable to stem the torrent, the fault lay entirely with the bureaucracy which had killed by long years of neglect and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress.  The Extremists boldly threw the whole responsibility for the movement on British rule and combined with a perfunctory and dubious condemnation of the crimes themselves an ecstatic admiration for the heroism which had driven the youth of India to follow the example of the Russian intelligentsia in its revolt against an autocracy as brutal and as odious as that of Russia.  Mere measures of repression under the ordinary law were clearly incapable of coping with a situation which was becoming no less dangerous in its negative than in its positive aspects.  British rule in India had concentrated so largely on mechanical efficiency that it had gradually lost sight of the old and finer principles of Anglo-Indian as well as of British statesmanship based on the paramount importance