ier and
better days, was destined to play a far more important part than was for
a long time realised by Englishmen in India or at home. Many of
them--such as Mr. Bonnerji, a distinguished Bengalee, Pherozeshah Mehta,
a rising member of the great Parsee community in Bombay, Dadabhai
Naoroji, who was later on to be the first Indian to put forward plainly
India's claim to self-government within the British Empire--had spent
several years in England. Others, like Ranade and Telang, had been for a
long time past vigorous advocates of Indian social reforms. With them
were a few Englishmen--chief among them a retired civilian Mr. Hume--who
were in complete sympathy with their aspirations. Only the Mahomedans
were unrepresented, though not uninvited, partly because few of them had
been caught up in the current of Western thought and education, and
partly because the community as a whole, reflecting the ancient and
deep-seated antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, distrusted
profoundly every movement in which Hindus were the leading spirits. Lord
Reay, who was then Governor of Bombay, was invited to preside and
declined only after asking for instructions from the Viceroy, Lord
Dufferin, who, though not unfriendly, held that it was undesirable for
the head of a Provincial Government to associate himself with what
should essentially be a popular movement. Mr. Bonnerji, who was selected
to take the chair, emphatically proclaimed the loyalty of the Congress
to the British Crown. Amongst the most characteristic resolutions moved
and carried was one demanding the appointment of a Royal Commission, on
which the people of India should be represented, to inquire into the
working of the Indian administration, and another pleading for a large
expansion of the Indian Legislative Councils and the creation of a
Standing Committee of the House of Commons to which the majority in
those Councils should have the right to appeal if overruled by the
Executive.

The Congress claimed to represent the educated opinion of India, and,
though Government withheld from it all official recognition, it
flattered itself not without reason that its preaching had not fallen on
to altogether barren soil when, still under Lord Dufferin's Viceroyalty,
the Indian Local Government Act of 1888 marked a large advance upon the
reforms in local and municipal institutions which, with the repeal of
the Lytton Press Act, had been amongst the few tangible results of Lord