tion." Such a storm showed how heavily laden was the atmosphere with
dangerous electricity.

For some years past the influence of Tilak and his irreconcilable school
had been projected from the Deccan into Bengal, and nowhere did it make
itself so rapidly felt as in the Press. The _Calcutta Review_ has been
publishing a very instructive history of the Indian Press by Mr. S.C.
Sanial, a Hindu scholar who has had the advantage of consulting
authentic and hitherto unpublished documents. His erudite work shows how
the native Press of India first grew up in Bengal as the direct product
of English education, and faithfully reflected all the fluctuations of
educated Bengalee opinion, many of the most influential native
newspapers continuing to be published in English, side by side with, and
often under the same control as, more popular papers published in the
vernacular. Among the "advanced" journalists of Bengal, none had fallen
so entirely under the spell of Tilak's magnetic personality as Mr. Bepin
Chandra Pal and Mr. Arabindo Ghose, and the former's _New India_ and the
latter's _Bande_ also published in English, soon outstripped the
aggressiveness of Mr. Surendranath Banerjee's _Bengalee_. For though
not immune from the reaction against Western influences and in favour of
Hinduism as a religious and social system, the school represented by Mr.
Banerjee confined itself at first mainly to political agitation and to
criticism of British methods of administration. The new school
represented, perhaps most conspicuously, by Mr. Arabindo Ghose scarcely
disguised its hostility to British rule itself and to all that British
ascendancy stands for. Hinduism for the Hindus, or, as they preferred to
put it, "Arya for the Aryans," was the war-cry of zealots, half
fanatics, half patriots, whose mysticism found in the sacred story of
the _Bhagvat Gita_ not only the charter of Indian independence but the
sanctification of the most violent means for the overthrow of an alien
rule. With this "Aryan" reaction, having to a great extent the force of
religious enthusiasm behind it, orthodoxy also recovered ground, and
Brahmanism was not slow to show how potent it still is even in Bengal
when it appeals to the superstitions of the masses. In one form or
another this spirit had spread like wildfire not only among the students
but among the teachers, and the schools of physical training to which
young Bengal had taken, partly under the influence of