perial Legislative Council, an unofficial
majority and control over the Central Government except in certain
reserved matters. The scheme was hazy, bore evident marks of haste, and
aggravated immensely the dangers with which experience had already shown
the Morley-Minto reforms to be fraught. It was an attempt to make the
Central and Provincial Governments in India dependent upon the caprice
of legislatures, with no mandate from any representative electorate and
no training in responsible government, but completely immune to the
consequences of their own mistakes. It must have led to a hopeless
deadlock and the complete paralysis of Government, but even so it did
not satisfy the more fiery members of the Indian National Congress,
where, in complete unison with the All-India Moslem League, finally
captured by some slight concessions to Mahomedan sentiment, resolutions
were passed more crude and unworkable than the scheme of the Nineteen,
and virtually amounting to Home Rule in its most impracticable shape.

The Congress was at last passing under Extremist control. Its first
session during the war was held in December 1914 in Bombay, and under
the presidency of Mr. Bupendranath Basu, afterwards a member of the
Secretary of State's Council, the proceedings reflected the general
enthusiasm with which India had rallied to the cause of the Empire. But
before the Congress met again a disease common amongst Indians and
aggravated by overwork and anxiety had carried away in April 1915, still
in the prime of life, the founder of the "Servants of India Society,"
Mr. Gokhale, himself perhaps the greatest servant of India that has
toiled in our time for her social as well as her political advancement.
His friends believed that in his case the end was precipitated by an
acute controversy with Mr. Tilak, to whom he had made one last appeal to
abandon his old attitude of irreconcilable opposition. A few months
later, in November, the veteran Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, who had fought
stoutly ever since Surat against any Congress reunion, in which he
clearly foresaw that the Moderates would be the dupes of the Extremists,
passed away in his seventy-first year, but not before he had sent a
message, worded in his old peremptory style, to Sir Satyendra Sinha,
daring him to refuse the chairmanship of the coming session which was to
be held in December in Bombay. Sir Satyendra came, and his great
personal influence kept the Indian National Congres