but did not
despair of bringing constitutional methods of agitation to bear upon
British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National Congress, which they
had founded twenty years before, was sliding rapidly down the inclined
plane which was to lead first to open and violent discord and later on
to disruption. Even before the Partition the Moderates could make but a
poor reply to those who jeered at the paltry results which had attended
their practice of constitutional forms of agitation. For if the Indian
Councils Act of 1892 had opened the doors of the Viceroy's Legislative
Assembly to some of the most distinguished among them, what had it
profited them? The official benches merely gave a courteous hearing to
the incisive criticisms proceeding from men of such undisputed capacity
as Mehta and Gokhale and bore less patiently with the Ciceronian periods
of the great Bengalee tribune Surendranath Banerjee. Government paid
little or no heed to them. Equally powerless had been their passionate
protest against the Partition. Even had they not been in complete
sympathy with popular feeling, they would have been compelled to voice
it or surrender the leadership they still hoped to retain to the new
Extremist party which, under Mr. Tilak's leadership, was carrying his
doctrines and his methods far beyond the limits of the Deccan. Each
annual session of the Congress grew more turbulent and the Moderates
gave ground each year, until at the famous Surat session of 1907 they
realised that they had to make a definite stand or go under. There the
storm burst over the preliminary proceedings before the real issues were
reached. Mr. Tilak's followers assailed the presidential platform of
which the Moderates had still retained possession, and the Congress
broke up in hopeless confusion and disorder.

But what happened in the Congress was but a pale reflection of what was
happening outside. The Partition was indeed little more than the signal
for an explosion, not merely in Bengal, of which premonitory indications
had been witnessed, but had passed almost unheeded, some ten years
earlier in the Deccan. The cry of _Swaraj_ was caught up and re-echoed
in every province of British India. In Calcutta the vow of _Swadeshi_
was administered at mass meetings in the famous temple of Kali. Hindu
reactionaries, whose conception of a well-ordered society had not moved
beyond the laws of Manu, fell into line for the moment with the
intellectual pro