ionists. Scarcely a month and often
not a week passed without adding to the tale of outrages. I need not
recite them in detail. Perhaps the most significant feature was the
double purpose many of them indicated of defeating the detection and
punishment of crime and of striking terror into Indians who ventured to
serve the British, _Raj_[8]. Thus, on February 10, 1909, Mr. Ashutosh
Biswas, the Public Prosecutor and a Hindu of high character and
position, was shot dead outside the Alipur Police Court, and, in like
manner nearly a year later, Mr. Shams-ul-Alam, a Mahomedan Inspector of
the Criminal Investigation Department in the High Court itself of
Calcutta. Sedition was seething over the greater part of both Bengals,
and though the agricultural population remained for the most part
untouched or indifferent, there were few even of the smaller towns and
larger villages that were not visited by the missionaries of revolution.
_Swadeshi_ and the boycott were now merely an accompaniment to the
deeper and more menacing trumpet-call of open revolt, but they helped
"to keep the country awake" even where the true spirit of _Swaraj_ had
not yet been kindled. The _mofussil_ was honeycombed with secret
societies, whose daring dacoities served not only to collect the sinews
of war, but to impress the timid and recalcitrant with the powerlessness
of the State to protect them against the midnight raider. Truly the
teachings of the _Yugantar_ were bearing fruit, even to the laying down
of life and the taking of life. Unlike the majority of Bengalee
agitators, the writers in the _Yugantar_, it must be admitted, did not
flinch from the danger of practising what they taught. Most of them came
ultimately within the grasp of the Criminal Code, and Barendra Ghose,
who was arrested in connexion with the manufacture of bombs in the
Maniktolla garden, was sentenced to death, though subsequently
reprieved. His brother, Arabindo, on the other hand, though arrested at
the same time, had the good fortune to be acquitted. The work done by
the _Yugantar_ lived, nevertheless, after it, and is still living.

A very heavy responsibility must at the same time attach to those
responsible both at home and in India for the extraordinary tolerance
too long extended to this criminal propaganda. For two whole years it
was carried on with relative impunity under the very eyes of the
Government of India in Calcutta. Month after month they must have seen
its auda