tely
independent of the class interests and personal bias to which the
politician is almost always liable. Moreover, the chief, and perfectly
legitimate, object to which the Anglo-Indian administrator is bound to
address himself is, as Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal once candidly admitted, to
capture "the heart, the mind of the people ... to secure, if not the
allegiance, at least the passive, the generous acquiescence of the
general mass of the population." To make his meaning perfectly clear,
Mr. Pal instanced the rural reforms, the agricultural banks and other
things which had been done in Lord Curzon's time, "to captivate the mind
of the teeming masses," and he added that "he is a foolish politician in
India who allows the Government to capture the mind of the masses to the
exclusion of his own influence and his own countrymen." Mr. Pal is from
his point of view perfectly logical, and so were the writers in the
_Yugantar_, who, when they elaborated their scheme of revolutionary
propaganda, declared that the first step must be to undermine the
confidence of the people in their rulers and to destroy the spirit of
contentedness under an alien yoke. But could there be a more striking
tribute to the intelligent and sympathetic treatment of the interests of
the Indian masses by their British rulers than such admissions on the
part of the enemies of British rule?

From this point of view nothing but good should result from the larger
opportunities given by the recent reforms for the discussion of Indian
questions in the enlarged Councils, so long as the Indian
representatives in these Councils are drawn, as far as possible, from
the different classes which, to some extent, reflect the different
interests of the multitudinous communities that make up the people of
India. The British civilian will have a much better chance than he has
hitherto had of meeting his detractors in the open, and, if one may
judge by the proceedings last winter, when the Councils met for the
first time under the new conditions, there is little reason to fear, as
many did at first, that he will be taken at a disadvantage in debate
owing to the greater fluency and rhetorical resourcefulness of the
Indian politician. It was not only in the Imperial Council in Calcutta
that the official members, having the better case and stating it quite
simply, proved more than a match for the more exuberant eloquence of
their opponents. On the contrary, the personal contact