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Partition of Bengal was modified and on the lines I suggested in my message, and eight years before Mr. Montagu's announcement in August, 1917, promising Dominion status for India. A part of my message has already been fulfilled. I have dreamt many dreams in my life. Some of them have been realized. Others are awaiting the flux of time for their fulfilment. Among them I regard our admission into the British Commonwealth, as an equal partner with an equal status, as among the certainties of the future. Mr. Stead did me the honour of writing a personal note on myself in the Review of Reviews, as an introduction, which, with the reader's permission, I reproduce in this place:
'I travelled down to Lord Northcliffe's seat at Sutton with Mr. Banerjea, when the editors of the Empire went down to lunch at that delightful place; and formed the highest opinion of his lucid intelligence, his marvellous command of English, and his passionate devotion to his native land. I had the honour of being one of the guests at the banquet given to him by his fellow-countrymen in England at the Westminister Palace Hotel, and was delighted to find in him an orator of brilliant eloquence and a statesman of comprehensive outlook, with a most practical mind. I invited him to my house, and there in company with a dozen friends—American, Canadian, Irish and Indian—Mr. Banerjea kindly submitted himself to a process of composite interviewing, the gist of which my readers will find condensed in this article. Mr. Banerjea has been twice President of the Indian National Congress; he has been once in gaol, he is the editor of the Bengalee, and his repute is such that he was once said to have been crowned king of Bengal as a protest against the Partition. He was the only representative of the Native Indian Press at the Conference, and none of the editors of the Empire excelled him in eloquence, energy, geniality, and personal charm.'
I returned to India in August, 1909 and was welcomed home with cordiality and enthusiasm. My reception at the Howrah station was on a scale rivalling that accorded to Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji when he came to Calcutta to preside over the Congress of 1906, and it was followed by a Town Hall meeting, one of the most enthu- siastic ever held in that historic hall. In my private conversations as well as in my public utterances, I emphasized what was with me a deliberate conviction—that the Partition was not to be regarded as a settled fact, despite Lord Morley's oft-repeated declarations to the contrary, and that there was a slowly growing feeling in England that some measure of self-government must be conceded to India.