who suffered heavily from the anti-Asiatic campaign along the Pacific slope, and some of these converts, being Sikhs and old soldiers, were of special value, as through them direct contact could be established with the regiments to which they had belonged, or, at any rate, with the classes from which an important section of the native army is recruited.  Large quantities of seditious leaflets, circulated broadcast three years ago amongst Sepoys, were printed in America.  The other organization, called the Young Indian Association, with “head centres” and “inner” and “outer circles” that have a genuine Fenian ring, is even more “extreme,” and is connected with the “Indian Red Flag” in India, to which Khudiram Bose, who murdered Mrs. and Miss Kennedy at Muzafferpur, and other young fanatics of the same type belonged.  The Young Indian Association seems to devote itself chiefly to the study of explosives and to smuggling arms into India.  In Anglo-Indian official circles extreme reticence is naturally observed in these matters, but from other sources I have seen evidence to show that both these associations were in frequent communication with the seditious Press all over India, in the Deccan as well as in Bengal and in the Punjab.

The emergence of Japan has created so powerful an impression in India that one is not surprised to find the Indian revolutionaries, who live for the most part in the dreamland of their own ignorance, looking in that quarter for guidance and even, perhaps, for assistance.  But they have been sorely disappointed.  Indian students are well received in Japan, but they are in nowise specially petted or pampered, and when they begin to air their political opinions and to declaim against British rule they are very speedily put in their place.  Crossing the Pacific from Japan to America last year I met one who had spent two or three years at Tokyo and was going on to continue his technical studies in the United States.  He was a pleasant and intelligent young fellow, and confessed to me that what he had seen in Japan had very much modified the views he had held when he left Bengal as to the ripeness of his fellow-countrymen for independence or self-government.  He had received a great deal of kindness from his Japanese professors, but the general attitude of the Japanese was by no means friendly, and there was no trace of sympathy with the political agitation in India.  There is an Indo-Japanese Society in Tokyo, but it has no connexion with politics, and the Indians complain that it is run for the benefit of the Japanese rather than for theirs.  Those who have joined it in the hope of using it as a base for anti-British operations have certainly got very little for their pains.  They occasionally write articles for the very few Socialist papers of Japan, but their effective contribution to the cause is of trifling account.