s on the rails, and
defeated the projects already on foot once more for delivering it into
the hands of Mr. Tilak and his followers. But the death of those two
pillars of the Moderate party at such a critical juncture proved to be
an irreparable loss. When Mr. Gokhale's political testament was
published, it was dismissed by the Extremists as a well-meant but quite
obsolete document. The Congress found a new and strange Egeria in Mrs.
Besant, who had thrown herself into Indian politics when, owing to
circumstances[2] which had nothing to do with politics, the faith that
many respectable Hindus had placed in her, on the strength of her
theosophical teachings, as a vessel of spiritual election was rudely
shaken. But nothing shook the mesmeric influence which she had acquired
over young India by preaching with rare eloquence the moral and
spiritual superiority of Indian over Western creeds, and condemning the
British administration of India, root and branch, as one of the worst
manifestations of Western materialism. With her remarkable power of
seizing the psychological moment, she had fastened on to the catchword
of "Home Rule for India," into which Indians could read whatever measure
of reform they happened to favour, whilst it voiced the vague aspiration
of India to be mistress in her own house, and to be freed from the
reproach of "dependency" in any future scheme of reconstruction. She
herself gave it the widest interpretation in _New India_, a newspaper
whose extreme views expressed in the most extreme form drew down upon
her not only the action of Government but the censure of the High Court
of Madras. At the Congress session held at Lucknow at the end of 1916
she shared the honours of a tremendous ovation with Tilak, whose
sufferings--and her own--in the cause of India's freedom her newspaper
compared with those of Christ on the Cross. Resolutions were carried not
only requesting that the King Emperor might be pleased "to issue a
proclamation announcing that it is the aim and intention of British
policy to confer self-government on India at an early date," but setting
forth in detail a series of preliminary reforms to be introduced
forthwith in order to consummate the "bloodless revolution" which,
according to the President's closing oration, was already in full blast.
The All-India Moslem League sitting at the same time at Lucknow followed
the Congress lead.

To those feverish days at Lucknow the session of the Imp