Partition.  For those amongst them who were merchants the boycott spelt serious injury to their trade and led in some instances to reprisals in which the Hindus fared badly.  Whenever it happened in this way that the biter was bit, the Bengalee Press accused the Government of encouraging the revival of sectarian strife, just as it denounced every measure for the maintenance of order which the Government was compelled to take in the discharge of one of its most elementary duties, as brutal repression and arbitrary vindictiveness, and any mistake of procedure made by some subordinate official under the stress of a very critical situation was distorted and magnified into a gross denial of justice.  But it was out of the punishments very properly inflicted upon the misguided schoolboys and students whom the politicians had put in the forefront of the fray that the greatest capital was made.  Whilst the politicians themselves prudently remained for the most part in Calcutta, making high-sounding speeches and writing inflammatory articles, or were careful in their own overt demonstrations not to overstep the extreme bounds of legality, they showered telegrams and letters of congratulation on the young “martyrs” who had been duly castigated.

The leaders of the movement had also another string to their bow which they used with considerable effect.  Never before had there been such close contact between Indian politicians and certain groups of English politicians.  Lord Curzon’s fall and the extremely injudicious references to Partition made by Mr. Brodrick, the then Secretary of State, in the correspondence published after the resignation of the Viceroy, had from the first given a great stimulus to the anti-Partition campaign, Mr. Brodrick’s remarks led the Bengalees to form a very exaggerated estimate of the personal part played by Lord Curzon in the question of Partition, and they not unnaturally concluded that, if the Secretary of State had merely sanctioned the Partition in order to humour the Viceroy, he might easily be induced to reconsider the matter when once Lord Curzon had been got out of the way.  Their hopes in that quarter were, it is true, very soon dashed, but only to be strung up again to the highest pitch of expectancy when the Conservative Government fell from power, and was replaced by a Liberal Administration, with Mr. John Morley at the India Office and an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, in which the Radical element was very strongly represented.  Several of the leading Radical organs in England had for a long time past joined hands with the Bengalee Press in denouncing Lord Curzon and all his works, and, most fiercely of all, the Partition of Bengal.  The Bengalee politicians, moreover, not only had the active sympathy of a large section of Radical opinion at home, but they had in the House itself the constant co-operation of a small but energetic group of members, who constituted themselves into an “Indian party,”