was passed in the form upon which he insisted to the effect that the boycott movement was legitimate.  It was not till the following year at Surat, after the preaching of lawlessness had begun to yield its inevitable harvest of crime, that the “moderates” recoiled at last from the quicksands into which the “extremists” were leading them.  Tilak, however, carried out his threat, and he and his friends wrecked that session of the Congress amidst scenes of disgraceful riot and confusion.

Yet even after this the “moderates” lacked the courage of their convictions.  The breach has never been altogether repaired, but there have been frequent negotiations and exchanges of courtesies.  In the very next year at Madras a man as incapable of promoting or approving criminal forms of agitation as Dr. Rash Behari Ghose was holding out the olive branch to “the wayward wanderers” who had treated him so despitefully at Surat; and last year at Lahore, when Pandit Mohan Malavya was expounding from the chair the latest formula adopted by Congress as a definition of its aims, his chief anxiety seemed to be to prove that it offered no obstacle to the return of the Surat insurgents to the fold.  This formula, it may be mentioned, lays down that “the objects of the Indian National Congress are the attainment by the people of India of a system of Government similar to that enjoyed by the self-governing members of the British Empire and a participation by them in the rights and responsibilities of the Empire on equal terms.”  This is a formula which many “moderates” no doubt construe in a spirit of genuine loyalty, but it does not exclude the construction which more “advanced” politicians like Mr. Pal place upon Swaraj.

The last session of the Congress at Lahore, in December last, is generally admitted to have aroused very little enthusiasm, and there are many who believe that, weakened as it has been by recent dissensions, it will scarcely survive the creation of the new enlarged Councils.  These Councils have been so constituted that they will be able to discharge usefully the functions which the Congress arrogated to itself without any title or authority.  Perhaps it was the consciousness that the Congress would at any rate be henceforth overshadowed by the new Councils that led Pandit Malavya to inveigh so bitterly in his presidential address at Lahore against the shape ultimately given to the reforms.  What one may hope above all is that the Councils will help to give the Indian “moderates” a little more self-reliance than they have hitherto shown.  The Indian National Congress has at all times contained many men of high character and ability, devoted to what they conceived to be the best interests of their country, and at first, at any rate, quite ready to acknowledge the benefits of British rule and to testify to their conviction that the maintenance of British rule is essential to the welfare and safety of India.  Many of them must have seen that the