whose programme I have already quoted.  The other was Mr. Arabindo Ghose, one of the most remarkable figures that Indian unrest has produced.  Educated in England, and so thoroughly that when he returned to India he found it difficult to express himself in Bengali, he is not only a high-caste Hindu, but he is one of those Hindu mystics who believe that, by the practice of the most extreme forms of Yoga asceticism, man can transform himself into a super-man, and he has constituted himself the high priest of a religious revival which has taken a profound hold on the imagination of the emotional youth of Bengal.  His ethical gospel is not devoid of grandeur.  It is based mainly on the teachings of Krishna to Arjuna as revealed in the Bhagvad Gita, and I cannot hope to define its moral purpose better than by borrowing the following sentence from Mrs. Besant’s introduction to her translation of “The Lord’s Song":—­

It is meant to lift the aspirant from the lower levels of renunciation where objects are renounced, to the loftier heights where desires are dead and where the Yogi dwells in calm and ceaseless contemplation, while his body and mind are actively employed in discharging the duties that fall to his lot in life.

This reading of the Bhagvad Gita differentiates the newer Indian conception of renunciation, which does not exclude but rather prescribes the duty of service to society, from the older conception, which was concerned merely to procure the salvation of the individual by his complete detachment from all mundane affairs.  With this gospel of active self-sacrifice none can assuredly quarrel, but it is the revolutionary form which Mr. Arabindo Ghose would see given to such activity that, unfortunately, chiefly fascinates the rising generation of Bengalees.  For him British rule and the Western civilization for which it stands threaten the very life of Hinduism, and therefore British rule and all that it stands for must go, and in order that they may go every Hindu must be up and doing.  That Mr. Arabindo Ghose himself holds violence and murder to be justifiable forms of activity for achieving that purpose cannot be properly alleged, for though he has several times been placed on his trial and in one instance for actual complicity in political crime—­namely, in the Maniktolla bomb case—­and though he is at present a fugitive from justice, the law has so far acquitted him.  But that his followers have based upon his teachings a propaganda by deed of the most desperate character is beyond dispute.  It has been openly expounded with fanatical fervour and pitiless logic in a newspaper edited by his brother, Barendra Ghose, of which the file constitutes one of the most valuable and curious of human documents.