governments had discharged their responsibilities before the transfer of
India to the Crown, and rude was the awakening for the British
administrator in India and for British ministers at home when the
explosion that followed the Partition of Bengal revealed a very
different India that was in process of evolution with much and dangerous
travail out of the reaction of new forces, hitherto almost unobserved,
upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as
negligible quantities.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A detailed and learned study of these movements is found in Dr.
J.N. Farquhar's _Modern Religious Movements in India_, published by
the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST

Amongst the Western-educated classes the new forces which had been
turning the minds of young India towards _Swaraj_ as the watchword of
national unity and independence had drawn much of their inspiration from
text-books which taught them how large a share Nationalism had played in
redeeming modern nations from alien oppression and in shaping the whole
political evolution of Europe. It had emancipated the Balkan States from
the alien thraldom of the Ottoman Sultans; it had helped to unify Italy
and Germany; it had been a potent if less apparent factor in welding
Great Britain and the distant colonies peopled by the British race into
a great British Empire. Had not Indians also a common nationhood which,
despite all racial and religious differences, could be traced back
across centuries of internal strife and foreign domination to a period,
remote indeed but none the less enviable, when they had been their own
masters? Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest
barriers to India's national unity--the multiplicity of her
vernaculars--by giving English to the Western-educated classes as a
common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never
have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of
India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National
Congress itself would have been an impossibility? Great events,
moreover, had been happening quite recently which tended to shake the
Indians' belief in the irresistible superiority of Western civilisation
even in its material aspects. The disaster inflicted upon an Italian
army at Adowa in 1894 by the Abyssinians--a backward African people
scarcely known except for the ease wi