The attitude of Government who had accepted the Congress’s assurances of loyalty, and recognized its aims, as defined by it, to be “perfectly legitimate in themselves,” was laid down for the first time officially in 1890, under Lord Lansdowne’s Viceroyalty, in terms that were certainly not hostile:—­

The Government of India recognize that the Congress movement is regarded as representing in India what in Europe would be called the more advanced Liberal Party as distinguished from the great body of Conservative opinion which exists side by side with it.  They desire themselves to maintain an attitude of neutrality in their relations with both parties, so long as these act strictly within constitutional limits.

To the principles of that declaration the Government of India has strictly adhered ever since, even when, as in 1905, the Congress might have been deemed to have over-stepped those constitutional limits by endorsing the Bengalee doctrine of boycott.

Though the majority of the Congress probably glided unconsciously or without any deliberate purpose from, its earlier attitude of remonstrance and entreaty into violent denunciation of Government and all its works, there had always been a small group determined to drive or to manoeuvre their colleagues as a body into an attitude of open and irreconcilable hostility.  That group was headed by Tilak, the strongest personality in Indian politics, who was gradually making recruits among the more ardent spirits all over India.  On one occasion, as far back as 1895, when the Congress held its annual session in his own city of Poona, he had attempted to commit it to the aggressive doctrines which he was already preaching in the Deccan, but he soon discovered that the temper of the majority was against him.  He was, however, far too tenacious ever to accept defeat.  He bided his time.  He knew he had to reckon with powerful personal jealousies, and he remained in the background.  His opportunity did not come till ten years later when he pulled the strings at the two successive sessions held in 1905 at Benares and in 1906 at Calcutta.  It was then that the Congress passed from mere negative antagonism into almost direct defiance of Government.  It must have been a proud moment for Tilak when the very man who had often fought so courageously against his inflammatory methods and reactionary tendencies in the Deccan, Mr. Gokhale, played into his hands, and from the presidential chair at Benares got up to commend the boycott as a political weapon used for a definite political purpose.  A year later, it is true, Mr. Gokhale and the “moderate” party in the Congress, who had seen in the meantime to what lawlessness the boycott was leading, were anxious to undo or to mitigate at the Calcutta session what they had helped to do at Benares.  But again, by dint of lobbying and even more by threatening to break up the Congress, Tilak carried the day, and a resolution