In the same spirit another Punjab paper argues ironically from the speech of a Mahomedan member of the Punjab Legislative Council in condemnation of Dhingra that “all the white-skinned Europeans, including the English rulers of India, must be the lowest born people in the world, seeing that they are in the habit of killing natives every day.”

No public servants who venture to discharge their duty loyally fare worse at the hands of the Nationalist Press than Judges—­especially if they are Indians.  Mr. Justice Davar was the Parsee Judge who sentenced Tilak.  The Kesari declared that “he had already settled the sentence in his own mind after a careful consideration of external circumstances,” and “had made himself the laughing-stock of the whole world, like the meddlesome monkey in the fable who came to grief in trying to pull out the peg ‘from a half-sawed beam,’” Now the Kesari was Tilak’s own paper, and he was convicted on two seditious articles that had appeared in its columns, but the Kal, another Poona sheet, also maintained that everything was done on a prearranged plan.  “There is no sense in saying that Mr. Tilak was sentenced according to law.  There was mockery of justice, not justice.”  It added that “if the Hindus are to suppose Mr. Tilak guilty because an English Court of Justice had condemned him, Christians will have to forswear Christ because He was crucified by a Roman Court.”  The Karnatak Vaibhau recalled the story of the notorious washerman who, by scandalizing Rama, had been immortalized in the Ramayana.  In the same way the names of Strachey—­who sentenced Tilak at his first trial in 1897—­and Davar would be remembered as long as history endured.

Quotations could be multiplied ad infinitum and ad nauseam from the same papers—­I have given only one from each—­and from scores of others.  These will suffice to show what the freedom of the Press stood for in India, in a country where there is an almost superstitious reverence for, and faith in, the printed word, where the influence of the Press is in proportion to the ignorance of the vast majority of its readers, and where, unfortunately the more violent and scurrilous a newspaper becomes, the more its popularity grows among the very classes that boast of their education.  They are by no means obscure papers, and some of them, such as the Kal the Hind Swarajya, and especially the Yugantar, which became at one time a real power in Bengal, achieved a circulation hitherto unknown to the Indian Press.  Can any Englishman, however fervent his faith in liberty, regret that some at least of these papers have now disappeared either as the result of prosecutions under the Indian Criminal Code or from the operation of the new Press Law?  The mischief they have done still lives and will not be easily eradicated.  It is the fashion in certain quarters to reply:—­“But look at the Anglo-Indian newspapers, at the aggressive and contemptuous