the British connection altogether.  In some cases the homage paid to the righteousness of the British cause may not have been altogether genuine, but with the great majority it sprang from one thought, well expressed by Sir Satyendra Sinha, one of the most gifted and patriotic of India’s sons, in his presidential address to the Indian National Congress in 1915, that, at that critical hour in the world’s history, it was for India “to prove to the great British nation her gratitude for peace and the blessings of civilisation secured to her under its aegis for the last hundred and fifty years and more.”  The tales of German frightfulness and the guns of the Emden bombarding Madras, which were an ominous reminder that a far worse fate than British rule might conceivably overtake India, helped to confirm Indians in the conviction that the British Empire and India’s connection with it were well worth fighting for.  This was one of Germany’s many miscalculations, and the loyalty of the Indian people quite as much as the watchfulness of Government defeated the few serious efforts made by the disaffected emissaries and agents in whom she had put her trust to raise the standard of rebellion in India.  All they could do was to feed the “Indian Section” of the Berlin Foreign Office with cock-and-bull stories of successful Indian mutinies and risings, which the German public, however gullible, ceased at last to swallow.  Amongst the Indian Mahomedans there was a small pro-Turkish group, chiefly of an Extremist complexion, whose appeals to the religious solidarity of Islam might have proved troublesome when Turkey herself came into the war, had not Government deemed it advisable to put a stop to the mischievous activities of the two chief firebrands, the brothers Mahomed Ali and Shaukat Ali, by interning them under the discretionary powers conferred upon it by the Defence of India Act.  Indian Mahomedan troops fought with the same gallantry and determination against their Turkish co-religionists in Mesopotamia and Palestine as against the German enemy in France and in Africa, and the Mahomedan Punjab answered even more abundantly than any other province of India every successive call for fresh recruits to replenish and strengthen the forces of the Empire.

The British Government and people responded generously to these splendid demonstrations of India’s fundamental loyalty to the British cause and the British connection.  The Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, declared with special emphasis that in future Indian questions must be approached from “a new angle of vision,” and Indians, not least the Western-educated classes, construed his utterance into a pledge of the deepest significance.  For two years India presented on everything that related to the war a front unbroken by any dissensions.  The Imperial Legislative Council passed, almost without a murmur even at its most drastic provisions, repugnant as they were to the more advanced Indian members, a Defence of India