ducts of the modern Indian University. Hindu ascetics
appealed to the credulity of the masses and every Bar Association became
the centre of an active political propaganda on a Western democratic
model. Schoolboys and students were exhorted to abandon their studies
and go out into the streets, where they qualified as patriots by
marching in the van of national demonstrations for _Swaraj_ or by
furnishing picketing parties for the _Swadeshi_ boycott. The native
press, whether printed in the vernacular tongues or in the language of
the British tyrant, reached the extreme limits of licence, and when it
did not actually preach violence it succeeded in producing the
atmosphere which engenders violence. When passions were wrought up to a
white heat by fiery orators and still more fiery newspaper writers, who
knew how to draw equally effectively on the ancient legends of Hindu
mythology and on the contemporary records of Russian anarchism, the cult
of the bomb was easily grafted on to the cult of Shiva, the Destroyer,
and murders, of which the victims were almost as often Indians in
Government service as British-born officials, were invested with a halo
of religious and patriotic heroism. Youths even of the better classes
banded themselves together to collect patriotic funds by plunder and
violence, and revived those old forms of lawlessness which had been
rampant in pre-British days under the name of _dacoity_. Schools and
colleges were found to be honeycombed with secret societies, and a flood
of light was suddenly thrown on the disastrous workings of an
educational system that had been slowly perverted to such ends under the
very eyes of the Government that was supposed to direct and control it.

Lord Curzon had held a special conference at Simla in 1900 "to consider
the system of education in India," but not a single Indian and only one
non-official European had been invited to take part in it. It was the
intellectual shortcomings of the system with which he was concerned, and
the chief outcome of that conference and of a Commission subsequently
appointed to carry on the inquiry was the Universities Act of 1904,
carried in the face of bitter Indian opposition. Even such broad-minded
and experienced Indians as Gokhale and Mehta suspected the Viceroy of a
desire to hamper the growth of higher Western education on political
grounds. But throughout the four years' controversy Government never
betrayed an inkling of the appallin