er names of scarcely less distinction amongst the many highly
educated Bengalees who have served and are still serving the State with
undoubted loyalty and ability. With the spread of English education,
habits of tolerance have grown up, at any rate as to externals; and
though on the crucial point of inter-marriage caste law has lost hardly
anything of its rigidity, religion, in the ordinary intercourse of life,
seems to sit almost as lightly upon educated Hindu society in Calcutta
as upon English society in London. Another result of English education,
combined with the absence of such traditions of Brahman supremacy as are
still recent and powerful in the Deccan, has been to invest the
political aspirations of the Bengalees with that democratic tinge which
has won the sympathies of English Radicals; and, even if the tinge in
most cases be very slight, the Bengalee's own adaptability enables him
to clothe his opinions with extraordinary skill and verisimilitude in
the form which he intuitively knows will best suit an English audience.
Of any real democratic spirit amongst the educated classes of Bengal it
is difficult to find a trace, for they are separated from the masses
whom they profess to represent by a social gulf which only a few of the
most enlightened amongst them have so far even recognized the necessity
of making some attempt to bridge if they wish to give the slightest
plausibility to their professions. It would be less far-fetched, though
the analogy would still be very halting, to compare the position of the
Bengalee "moderates" with that of the middle classes in England before
the Reform Bill of 1832, who had no idea of emancipating the masses, but
only of emancipating themselves to some extent from the control of a
close oligarchy. From this point of view there are undoubtedly, and
especially amongst the elder generation, many educated Bengalees who are
convinced that in claiming by political agitation a larger share in the
administration and government of the country they are merely carrying
into practice the blameless theories of civic life and political
activity which their reading of English history has taught them. Their
influence, however, has been rapidly undermined by a new and essentially
revolutionary school, who combine with a spirit of revolt against all
Western authority a reversion to some of the most reactionary
conceptions of authority that the East has ever produced, and,
unfortunately, it