at Sir Bampfylde Fuller had resigned. The
effect was instantaneous. The points at issue between Sir Bampfylde
Fuller and the Government of India have been fully and frequently
debated, and it is needless to discuss here the reasons given for his
resignation, or for its prompt acceptance by the Viceroy. What I am
concerned with is the effect produced by that incident. It was immediate
and disastrous. The Bengalee leaders took heart. They claimed Sir
Bampfylde's downfall as their triumph--theirs and their allies' at
Westminster. Those, on the other hand, who imagined that it was Sir
Bampfylde's methods that had intensified the agitation and that his
removal would restore peace--even the sort of half peace which had been
so far maintained in Bengal proper under the milder sway of Sir Andrew
Fraser--were very soon undeceived. For if for a short time Sir Bampfylde
Fuller's successor was spared, the Government of Eastern Bengal was
compelled before long to take, more vigorous measures than he had ever
contemplated, and the agitation, which had hitherto refrained from
exhibiting its more violent aspects in Bengal proper, not only ceased to
show any discrimination, but everywhere broadened and deepened. The
veteran leaders, who still posed as "moderates," ceased to lead or,
swept away by the forces they had helped to raise, were compelled to
quicken their pace like the Communist leader in Paris who rushed after
his men exclaiming:--_Je suis leur chef, il faut bien que je les suive_.
The question of Partition itself receded into the background, and the
issue, until then successfully veiled and now openly raised, was not
whether Bengal should be one unpartitioned province or two partitioned
provinces under British rule, but whether British rule itself was to
endure in Bengal or, for the matter of that, anywhere in India.

The first phase of unrest in Bengal, at any rate in its outward
manifestations, had been mainly political, and on the whole free from
any open exhibition of disloyalty to the British _Raj_. With the
Partition of Bengal it passed into a second phase in which, new economic
issues were superadded to the political issues, if they did not
altogether overshadow them, and the _Swadeshi_ movement and the boycott
soon imported methods of violence and lawlessness which had hitherto
been considered foreign to the Bengalee temperament. This phase did not
last for much more than a year after the Partition, for, when once
sta