overnment. But his departure from India after Lord
Beaconsfield's defeat at the general election of 1880 and the return of
the Liberal party to power quickened new hopes which Lord Ripon, when he
became Viceroy in succession to Lord Lytton, showed every disposition to
justify.

All the greater was the disillusionment when a measure, introduced for
the purpose of abolishing "judicial disqualifications based on race
distinctions," not only provoked fierce opposition amongst the whole
European community and even amongst the rank and file of the civil
service, but was ultimately whittled down in deference to that
opposition until the very principle at issue was virtually surrendered.
Indians resented this fresh assertion of racial superiority, and saw in
the violence of the agitation, sometimes not far removed from threats of
actual lawlessness, and in the personal abuse poured out by his own
countrymen on the Queen's representative, the survival amongst a large
section of Europeans of the same hatred that had invented for a Viceroy
who was determined to temper justice with mercy after the Mutiny the
scornful nickname of "Clemency Canning."

The fate of the Ilbert Bill taught the Indians above all one practical
lesson--the potency of agitation. If by agitation a Viceroy enjoying the
full confidence of the British Government, with a powerful
Parliamentary majority behind it, could be compelled by the British
community in India, largely consisting of public servants, to surrender
a great principle of policy, then the only hope for Indians was to learn
to agitate in their own interests, and to create a political
organisation of their own in order both to educate public opinion in
India and influence public opinion in England. The men who started the
Indian National Congress were inspired by no revolutionary ambitions.
Though they did not talk, as Mr. Gandhi does to-day, about producing a
"change of hearts" in their British rulers, that was their purpose and
unlike Mr. Gandhi, they were firm believers not in any racial
superiority, but in the superiority of Western civilisation and of
British political institutions which they deemed not incapable of
transplantation on to Indian soil. So on December 28, 1885, a small band
of Indian gentlemen, who represented the _elite_ of the Western-educated
classes, met in Bombay to hold the first session of the Indian National
Congress which, with all its many shortcomings, even in its earl