of freedom, even
when freedom merely stands for licence; some were retired Anglo-Indians,
whose experience in the public service in India would have carried
greater weight had not the peculiar acerbity of their language seemed to
betray the bitterness of personal disappointment. Every invention or
exaggeration of the Bengalee Press found its way into the list of
questions to be asked of the Secretary of State, who, with less
knowledge than he has since acquired, doubtless considered himself bound
to pass them on for inquiry to the Government of India. A large
proportion of these questions were aimed at Sir Bampfylde Fuller, who,
as the first Lieutenant-Governor of the new province of Eastern Bengal,
had been singled out for every form of vituperation and calumny, and no
subject figured more prominently amongst them than the disciplinary
treatment of turbulent schoolboys and students. It is so easy to appeal
to the generous sentiments of the British public in favour of poor boys,
supposed to be of tender years, dragged into police courts by harsh
bureaucrats for some hasty action prompted by the generous, if foolish,
exuberance of youth, especially when the British public is quite unaware
that in India most students and many schoolboys are more or less
full-grown and often already married. Every one of these questions was
duly advertised in the columns of the Bengalee Press, and their
cumulative effect was to produce the impression that the British
Parliament was following events in Bengal with feverish interest and
with overwhelming sympathy for the poor oppressed Bengalee.

Nevertheless, there came a moment when the first feverish excitement
seemed to wane. Time had gone on, and though there was a new Viceroy in
India and a new Secretary of State at Whitehall, the Partition had
remained an accomplished fact. The visit of the Prince and Princess of
Wales to Calcutta had temporarily exercised a restraining influence on
the political leaders, and the presence of Royalty in a country where
reverence for the Throne is still a powerful tradition seemed to hush
even the forces of militant sedition. In Eastern Bengal, where the
agitation had been much fiercer than in Bengal proper, the energy and
devotion displayed by the Lieutenant-Governor in fighting a serious
threat of famine had won for him the respect of many of his opponents,
and the situation was beginning to lose some of its acuteness when it
was suddenly announced th