by the missionaries of revolution. Swadeshi and the boycott were now merely an accompaniment to the deeper and more menacing trumpet-call of open revolt, but they helped “to keep the country awake” even where the true spirit of Swaraj had not yet been kindled.  The mofussil was honeycombed with secret societies, whose daring dacoities served not only to collect the sinews of war, but to impress the timid and recalcitrant with the powerlessness of the State to protect them against the midnight raider.  Truly the teachings of the Yugantar were bearing fruit, even to the laying down of life and the taking of life.  Unlike the majority of Bengalee agitators, the writers in the Yugantar, it must be admitted, did not flinch from the danger of practising what they taught.  Most of them came ultimately within the grasp of the Criminal Code, and Barendra Ghose, who was arrested in connexion with the manufacture of bombs in the Maniktolla garden, was sentenced to death, though subsequently reprieved.  His brother, Arabindo, on the other hand, though arrested at the same time, had the good fortune to be acquitted.  The work done by the Yugantar lived, nevertheless, after it, and is still living.

A very heavy responsibility must at the same time attach to those responsible both at home and in India for the extraordinary tolerance too long extended to this criminal propaganda.  For two whole years it was carried on with relative impunity under the very eyes of the Government of India in Calcutta.  Month after month they must have seen its audacity grow in direct proportion to official apathy.  They must have seen a reign of lawlessness and intimidation spread steadily over a great part of the Metropolitan province.  The failure of the ordinary machinery of justice to check these crying evils was repeatedly brought home to them.  Yet it was not until 1908 that the necessity of exceptional measures to cope with an exceptional situation was tardily and very reluctantly realized.  The Indian Explosive Substances Act and Summary Justice Act of 1908, together with the Press Act of the same year and the more drastic one enacted last February, have at last to some extent checked the saturnalia of lawlessness that continued, though with signs of abatement, into the beginning of this year.  The Press Act of 1910, especially, seems to have really arrested the poisonous flow of printer’s ink and with it the worst forms of crime to which it maddened the feverish blood of Bengal.  But some of those who are most intimately acquainted with the inner workings of the revolutionary movement hold strongly that none of these enactments had such an immediately sobering effect as the deportation of the nine prominent Bengalees who were arrested at the end of 1908.  Such a measure is, I know, very repugnant to British traditions and British sentiment, and in this particular instance it unfortunately included two men whose criminal guilt was subsequently believed