gs. That in the new province of Eastern
Bengal, which was to be created by the Partition, the Mahomedans would
constitute a large majority and enjoy advantages hitherto denied to them
as a minority in the undivided province was an added grievance for the
Hindus. Lord Curzon had not at first been unpopular with the
Western-educated classes. They recognised his great intellectual gifts
and admired his majestic eloquence. But continuing to fasten their hopes
on the Liberal party in England, they had quickly followed its lead in
attacking him as a dangerous Imperialist, whose Tibetan adventure was
saddling the Indian tax-payer with the costs of his aggressive foreign
policy, and they required no promptings to denounce as the sworn foe of
India a Viceroy who had not only sought to restrict the statutory
freedom of their University, but, as its Chancellor, used language into
which they read a deliberate insult to the Bengalee character. By
partitioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee
"nation" and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose
honour the old invocation to the goddess Kali, "_Bande Materam_," or
"Hail to the Mother," acquired a new significance and came to be used as
the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism. To that war-cry public
meetings were organised in Calcutta and all over the province. The
native press teemed with denunciatory articles. The wildest rumours were
set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which partition portended.
Never had India seen such popular demonstrations. Government, however,
remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that
Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India--the last and
perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period
in which efficient administration had come to be regarded as the be-all
and end-all of government. His resignation, however, had nothing to do
with the Partition. He had fought and been defeated by Lord Kitchener,
then, and largely at his instance, Commander-in-Chief in India, over the
reorganisation of the military administration. Lord Curzon stood for the
supremacy of the civil over the military authority, but he made the
mistake of resigning not on the question of principle, on which he
finally agreed to a compromise, but on a subsidiary point which, fatal
as he may have thought it to the spirit of the compromise, appeared to
the outside public to be mainly a personal