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himself with the working of the Partition and with a well-known circular letter, which was one of the earliest indications of the birth of the reactionary policy that followed the Partition. The popular leaders have no quarrel with these tergiversations. But they note them as showing that strong convictions are perhaps a clog to official advancement in India, and those who change as the ruling official mind changes have the best prospects of official preferment.

Lord Ripon’s assumption of the Viceroyalty was a relief to the Indian public. The reactionary administration of Lord Lytton had roused the public from its attitude of indifference and had given a stimulus to public life. In the evolution cf political progress, bad rulers are often a blessing in disguise. They help to stir a community into life, a result that years of agitation would perhaps have failed to achieve. They call into being organized efforts which not only sweep away their bad measures, but create that public life and spirit which survives for all time to come, and is the surest guarantee of future and abiding progress. Lord Lytton was a benefactor, without intending to be one; and, more recently, Lord Curzon was a benefactor in the same sense, but perhaps on a larger scale.

We in India knew little or nothing about Lord Ripon or his antecedents. There were two circumstances that were in his favour. He was the nominee of Mr. Gladstone, who had thoroughly indentified himself with the popular view in India regarding the Vernacular Press Act, and he was a convert to Roman Catholicism and had suffered for his faith, We remembered what The Times wrote of him, when, giving up his great position in the social and public life of England, he deliberately faced the prospect of ruin by embracing the Roman Catholic faith. I was in England at the time and I remember the great stir it caused. I imagine differences of creed gave rise to stronger feelings in those days than they are now apt to evoke. The Times had a leading article in which it prophesied that Lord Ripon was a lost man. But in those days educated India, following the dictum of Cobden, approved what The Times disapproved; and we welcomed Lord Ripon as a ruler who had suffered for the faith that was in him. Events showed that we were fully justified; for one of the very first things that he said on assuming his great office was that he had it in charge from Her Majesty the Queen-Empress to look to the municipal institutions of the country; for there the political education of the people really began.

This declaration of a great policy was an open invitation to those