ently it
has been exercised almost exclusively in the seclusion of the zenana.
Even high-caste ladies, Hindus as well as Mahomedans, were known on this
occasion for the first time perhaps in their lives to pass beyond the
outer gates of their houses in order to attend a Royal reception--with
all the precautions of course that have always to be taken to shelter a
_purdah_ party from any contact with the other sex.

It became the fashion for all classes to draw their own happy auguries
from the Royal visit, but to none did it seem so auspicious as to the
politically-minded Indians. For it coincided with the sweeping defeat of
the Unionist party at the general election of 1905 and the return to
office of a Liberal Government with a crushing majority behind it, whom
the hostility displayed by the Liberal party towards Lord Curzon's
administration on almost every Indian question save that which had
brought about his resignation seemed to pledge to a prompt reversal of
his policy. Was not the appointment to the India Office of such a
stalwart Radical as Mr. John Morley, who had been Gladstone's Home Rule
Secretary for Ireland, enough to justify the expectation that the right
of India, if not to Home Rule, to a large measure of enfranchisement
would receive prompt recognition? If Indians could hardly regard Lord
Curzon's successor as another Ripon, their first impression of Lord
Minto satisfied them that, though the Conservative nominee of Mr.
Balfour's Government, the new Viceroy was neither disposed to tread in
his predecessor's footsteps as an autocratic administrator nor likely to
carry sufficient weight at home to stand in the way of a Secretary of
State who, like many Radical doctrinaires, was essentially what the
French call _un homme d'autorite_. The event proved that they were right
in their estimate of Lord Minto, but wrong in their sanguine expectation
that Mr. Morley would at once break with the old principles of Indian
government or even with Lord Curzon's administrative methods. Bengal
remained partitioned. It was a _chose jugee_ which Mr. Morley was not
prepared to reopen.

The disillusionment in India was much greater than after the fiasco of
the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still
unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India.
Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of
Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things