crime
were Chitpavan Brahmans, and at the same time they were the strange
products both of the Western education which we have imported into India
and of the religious revivalism which underlies the present political
agitation. They were certainly moral, if not physical, degenerates, and
most of them notoriously depraved, none bearing in this respect a worse
character than the actual murderer. I happened, when at Nasik, to see
the latter whilst he was performing his ablutions in front of the
Government building in which he was confined. Four policemen were in
charge of him, but he seemed absolutely unconcerned, and after having
washed himself leisurely, proceeded to discharges his devotions, looking
around all the while with a certain self-satisfied composure, before
returning to his cell. His appearance was puny, undergrown, and
effeminate, and his small, narrow, and elongated head markedly
prognathous, but he exercised over some of his companions a passionate,
if unnatural, fascination which, I have been told by one who was present
at the trial, betrayed itself shamelessly in their attitude and the
glances they exchanged with him during the proceedings. Distorted pride
of race and of caste combined with neuroticism and eroticism appear to
have co-operated here in producing as complete a type of moral
perversion as the records of criminal pathology can well show.

What are the secret forces by which these wretched puppets were set in
motion? Their activity was certainly not spontaneous. Who was it that
pulled the strings? There is reason to believe that the revolver with
which the murder was committed was one of a batch sent out by the Indian
ringleaders, who until the murder of Sir W. Curzon-Wyllie, had their
headquarters at the famous "India House," in Highgate, of which Swami
Krishnavarma was originally one of the moving spirits. Upon this and
other cognate points the trial of Vinayak Savarkar, formerly the London
correspondent of one of Tilak's organs and a familiar of the "India
House," and of some twenty-five other Hindus on various charges of
conspiracy which is now proceeding in the High Court of Bombay, may be
expected to throw some very instructive light.

The atmosphere of Nasik was no doubt exceptionally favourable for such
morbid growths. For Nasik is no ordinary provincial town of India. It is
one of the great strongholds of Hinduism. Its population is only about
25,000, but of these about 9,000 belong