The religious character with which the leaders sought to invest the boycott propaganda showed how far removed was the swadeshi which they preached from a mere innocent economic propaganda for the furtherance of native industries.  For a description of the Tantric rites connected with Shakti worship I must refer readers to M. Barth’s learned work on “The religions of India,” of which an English translation has been published by Messrs Truebner in their Oriental series.  In its extreme forms Shakti worship finds expression in licentious aberrations which, however lofty may be the speculative theories that gave birth to them, represent the most extravagant forms of delirious mysticism.  Yet such men as Mr. Surendranath Banerjee[7], who in his relations with Englishmen claims to represent the fine flower of Western education and Hindu enlightenment, did not hesitate to call the popularity of Shakti worship in aid in order to stimulate the boycott of British goods.  To prevent any blacksliding the agitators had ready to hand an organization which they did not hesitate to use.  The gymnastic societies founded in Bengal for physical training and semi-military drill on the model of those established by Tilak in the Deccan were transformed into bands of samitis or “national volunteers,” and students and schoolboys who had been encouraged from the first to take part in public meetings and to parade the streets in procession as a protest against Partition, were mobilized to picket the bazaars and enforce the boycott.  Nor were their methods confined to moral suasion.  Where it failed they were quite ready to use force.  The Hindu leaders had made desperate attempts to enlist the support of the Mahomedans, and not without some success, until the latter began to realize the true meaning both of the Partition and of the agitation against it.  Nothing was better calculated to enlighten them than another feature introduced also from the Deccan into the “national” propaganda.  In the Deccan the cult of Shivaji, as the epic hero of Mahratta history, was intelligible enough.  But in Bengal his name had been for generations a bogey with which mothers hushed their babies, and the Mahratta Ditch in Calcutta still bears witness to the terror produced by the daring raids of Mahratta horsemen.  To set Shivaji up in Bengal on the pedestal of Nationalism in the face of such traditions was no slight feat, and all Mr. Surendranath Banerjee’s popularity barely availed to perform it successfully.  But to identify the cause of Nationalism with the cult of the Mahratta warrior-king who had first arrested the victorious career and humbled the pride of the Mahomedan conquerors of Hindustan was not the way to win over to it the Mahomedans of Bengal.  In Eastern Bengal especially, with the exception of a few landlords and pleaders whose interests were largely bound up with those of the Hindus, the Mahomedans as a community had everything to gain and nothing to lose by the