th which a British expedition had
chastised them not thirty years before--was perhaps the first of these
events to awaken observant Indians to the fact that European arms were
not necessarily invincible. The resistance put up for nearly three years
by two small South African Republics, strong chiefly in their
indomitable pride of nationhood, seemed to have strained the resources
even of the British Empire, and Japan, an Asiatic power only recently
emerged from obscurity, had just proved on land and sea that an Asiatic
nation in possession of her national independence could equip herself to
meet and overcome one of the greatest of European powers--one whose vast
ambitions constituted in the eyes of generations of British statesmen a
grave menace to the safety of India itself. Was England really mightier
than Russia? Had she not also perhaps feet of clay? Was British rule to
endure for ever? Was it not a weak point in England's armour that she
had to rely not a little on Indian troops, whom she still treated as
mercenaries, to fight her battles even in such distant countries as
China and the Sudan, and upon still more numerous legions of Indians in
every branch of the civil administration to carry out all the menial
work of government? If the Indians, untrained, and indeed forbidden, to
bear arms, were unable at once to overthrow British rule, could they not
at least paralyse its machinery, as Bepin Chandra Pal was preaching, by
refusing to take any kind of service under it?

To such interpretations of contemporary events young Indians, who at
school read Burke and Byron and Mill "On Liberty," and in secret the
lives of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were bound to be receptive, and they
soon reached from a different base along different lines the same ground
on which the old orthodox foes not only of British rule but of Western
civilisation stood who appealed to the Baghavat-Ghita and exhorted
India to seek escape from the foreign domination that had enslaved her,
body and soul, by clinging to the social and religious ark of Hinduism
which in her golden age had made her wise and wealthy and free beyond
all the nations of the earth.

The stronghold of orthodox reaction was in the Mahratta Deccan, and its
stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never
forgiven us for snatching the cup of power from their lips just when
they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp. First
and foremost of t