city grow in direct proportion to official apathy. They must
have seen a reign of lawlessness and intimidation spread steadily over a
great part of the Metropolitan province. The failure of the ordinary
machinery of justice to check these crying evils was repeatedly brought
home to them. Yet it was not until 1908 that the necessity of
exceptional measures to cope with an exceptional situation was tardily
and very reluctantly realized. The Indian Explosive Substances Act and
Summary Justice Act of 1908, together with the Press Act of the same
year and the more drastic one enacted last February, have at last to
some extent checked the saturnalia of lawlessness that continued, though
with signs of abatement, into the beginning of this year. The Press Act
of 1910, especially, seems to have really arrested the poisonous flow
of printer's ink and with it the worst forms of crime to which it
maddened the feverish blood of Bengal. But some of those who are most
intimately acquainted with the inner workings of the revolutionary
movement hold strongly that none of these enactments had such an
immediately sobering effect as the deportation of the nine prominent
Bengalees who were arrested at the end of 1908. Such a measure is, I
know, very repugnant to British traditions and British sentiment, and in
this particular instance it unfortunately included two men whose
criminal guilt was subsequently believed not to be altogether beyond
doubt, though it may well have been argued that by financing and
administering a dangerous organization such as the _Anusilan Samiti_
they made themselves responsible for the deeds of its members.
Nevertheless, the deportation struck just at that type of agitator whose
influence is most pernicious because it is most subtle, and whose
responsibility is greatest because of his more experienced years and
greater social position. Such a measure, however, is only warranted in
extreme circumstances and cannot be transformed into indefinite
detention. The grounds on which Government announced the release of
these deportees last winter were even more unhappily chosen than the
moment for the announcement, but the event seems so far to have
justified Lord Minto's confidence, though one of the deported agitators,
Pulin Bahari Das, of Dacca, has had to be rearrested and is now under
trial at Dacca for conspiracy of a most serious character. There is
still much lawlessness in both Bengals.[9] The continued prevalence