with that of the middle classes in England before the Reform Bill of 1832, who had no idea of emancipating the masses, but only of emancipating themselves to some extent from the control of a close oligarchy.  From this point of view there are undoubtedly, and especially amongst the elder generation, many educated Bengalees who are convinced that in claiming by political agitation a larger share in the administration and government of the country they are merely carrying into practice the blameless theories of civic life and political activity which their reading of English history has taught them.  Their influence, however, has been rapidly undermined by a new and essentially revolutionary school, who combine with a spirit of revolt against all Western authority a reversion to some of the most reactionary conceptions of authority that the East has ever produced, and, unfortunately, it is this new school which has now got hold of the younger educated classes.

Education, to which in its more primitive forms the Bengalees owed whatever influence they retained under Mahomedan rule, has given them under British rule far larger opportunities which they have turned to account with no mean measure of success.  I must reserve the thorny question of education for separate treatment.  All I need say for the present is that, had it grown less instead of more superficial, had it been less divorced from discipline and moral training as well as from the realities of Indian life, the results might have been very different.  As it is, in the form given to it in our Indian schools and colleges, which have been allowed to drift more and more into native hands, English education has steadily deteriorated in quality as the output has increased in quantity.  The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous.  Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for them.  Soured on the one hand by their own failure, or by the failure of such examinations as they may have succeeded in passing to secure for them the employment to which they aspired, and scorning the sort of work to which they would otherwise have been trained, they are ripe for every revolt.  That is the material upon which the leaders of unrest have most successfully worked, and it is only recently that some of the more sober-minded Bengalees of the older generation have begun to realize the dangers inherent in such a system.  When in 1903 Lord Curzon brought in his Universities Bill to mitigate some of the most glaring evils of the system, there was a loud and unanimous outcry in Bengal that Government intended to throttle higher education because it was education that was making a “nation” of Bengal.  Subsequent events