themselves into political societies modelled upon the bands of gymnasts which figured so prominently in Tilak’s propaganda in the Deccan.  Among the older men, some yielded to the new spirit from fear of being elbowed out by their youngers, some were genuinely impatient of the tardiness of the constitutional reforms for which they had looked to the agency of the Indian National Congress; a few perhaps welcomed the opportunity of venting the bitterness engendered by social slights, real or imaginary, or by disappointments in Government service.

Such appears to have been the etat d’ame of Bengal when the Government of India promulgated the measure of administrative redistribution known as the Partition of Bengal.

CHAPTER VII.

THE STORM IN BENGAL.

The merits or demerits of the Partition of Bengal have already been discussed to satiety.  As far as its purpose was to promote administrative efficiency it is no longer on its defence.  Bengal proper is still the most populous province in India, but it has been brought within limits that at least make efficient administration practicable.  The eastern districts, now included in the new province, which had been hitherto lamentably neglected, have already gained enormously by the change, which was at the same time only an act of justice to the large Mahomedan majority who received but scanty consideration from Calcutta.  The only people who perhaps suffered inconvenience or material loss were absentee landlords, pleaders, and moneylenders, and some of the merchants of Calcutta, Anglo-Indian as well as native, who believed their interests to be affected by the transfer of the seat of provincial government for the Eastern Bengal districts to Dacca.  Nevertheless the Partition was the signal for an agitation such as India had not hitherto witnessed.  I say advisedly the signal rather than the cause.  For if the Partition in itself had sufficed to rouse spontaneous popular feeling, it would have been unnecessary for the leaders of the agitation to resort in the rural districts to gross misrepresentations of the objects of that measure.  What all the smouldering discontent, all the reactionary disaffection centred in Calcutta read into the Partition was a direct attack upon the primacy of the educated classes that had made Calcutta the capital of the Bengalee “nation.”  The Universities Act of 1904, it was alleged, had been the first attempt on the part of a masterful Viceroy to reduce their influence by curtailing their control of higher education.  Partition was a further attempt to hamper their activities by cutting half the “nation” adrift from its “intellectual” capital.  This was a cry well calculated to appeal to many “moderates,” whom the merely political aspects of the question would have left relatively unmoved and it certainly proved effective, for in Calcutta feeling ran very strong.  Whilst “monster” demonstrations were organized