telligentsia_ in its revolt against an autocracy as brutal and as
odious as that of Russia. Mere measures of repression under the ordinary
law were clearly incapable of coping with a situation which was becoming
no less dangerous in its negative than in its positive aspects. British
rule in India had concentrated so largely on mechanical efficiency that
it had gradually lost sight of the old and finer principles of
Anglo-Indian as well as of British statesmanship based on the paramount
importance of genuine co-operation between British and Indians. During
the Mutiny there were few of the Western-educated classes whose loyalty
to the British _Raj_ ever wavered. Fifty years later, when the _Raj_ was
confronted with a less violent but more insidious movement of revolt, a
large part of the Western-educated classes, whose influence and numbers
had increased immensely in the interval, were, if not in league, at
least to some extent in sympathy with it, and many of those who deplored
and reprobated it remained sulking in their tents. Government, they
declared, had always despised their co-operation. As it had made its
bed, so it must lie. It was a desperately short-sighted attitude, which
has had its nemesis in the "Non-co-operation" movement of the present
day. But, in a situation so severely strained, relief could only come
from England and from a return to the earlier British ideals, and to
those Indians who still looked for it there with some confidence after
the change of Government which had taken place at home in December 1905
it seemed to come very slowly.

CHAPTER VII

THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS

A British Government of a more advanced type of liberalism than any of
its Liberal predecessors found itself confronted as soon as it took
office with a more difficult situation in India than had ever been
dreamt of since the Mutiny, and the difficulties grew rapidly more
grave. When Mr. Morley went to the India Office during the respite from
agitation against the Partition of Bengal, procured by the visit of the
Prince and Princess of Wales to India even more than by Lord Curzon's
departure from India, the new Secretary of State allowed himself to be
persuaded that an agitation directed, so far, mainly against a harmless
measure of mere administrative importance must be largely artificial,
and he determined to maintain the Partition. He was entirely new to
Indian affairs, and his _Recollections_ show him to have been